All posts tagged: Art Journal

Get Messy Art Journal. Art 101. Week Five.

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Half magazine and half drawing. Ten Daffodils. Go with the flow, gestural yoga drawings. All I needed for this week’s art journal pages  was this simple folded journal and the ideas from the Get Messy Art Journal members blog. I had other plans for journal pages but I was completely smitten by this journal idea and wanted to fill it up (yes I know it only has a handful of pages!!). To make the journal, I used a page from the giant dictionary I bought a couple of weeks ago at an estate sale.  I like that it has pictures in with the print of the dictionary and I didn’t deliberately pick the page with ‘positive’, but I am pleased I ended up with it.  To be honest I pulled this page because I liked the Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish illustration which is on the daffodil page. This was a fun project and I have a full journal! Happy Thursday x

Get Messy Week Four. Season of Art 101

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This week I have been playing with background ideas and I painted some ombre backgrounds with a view to working on top of the pages.  I have run into a problem though. I don’t want to cover the backgrounds. This is one of my major art journaling issues, I can’t/won’t (delete as appropriate) layer pages.  If I like how the page starts, I like to leave it.  Maybe I will paint some more ombre base pages to work over so that I can keep the original pages. Or maybe I could work over half of each page. One thing I did manage to  do as planned was make up some colours and give them names.  This was a prompt from last week’s Art 101 Season. I came up with an idea to gather colour inspiration as I watched the TV!  As I watched Planet Earth II on BBC America I had my notebook with me and whenever I saw a colour I liked or a colour idea, I noted it down and wrote down the …

Get Messy Art 101 Week Two

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Week two of Art 101 and we are messing about with texture. I worked on one of the pages I started last week and added some texture using a doily to print and then I stuck it down when I had printed with it and it was starting to get soggy! The second page is a background I made a while ago.  I added some texture to this page and the first page using gold paint and a mesh bag which had lemons in it which had to be emptied out. I painted on the quote and all done! ‘Enable the chance for something to happen’ – sound advice from Christoph Niemann who is featured on the first episode of ‘Abstract’ on Netflix. I have watched the first three episodes and it is an excellent series about the design process. If you are interested in the Get Messy Art Journaling community, check out their website and public blog. Happy Creating and Happy Thursday.

The Grey Journal is about to travel the world.

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I have never participated in a traveling journal before, so I did what anyone would and I joined two groups! This is the first journal and my colour is grey.  How it works is I make a journal and art a couple of spreads inside using greys only.  Then I send it onto the next person in the group and so it continues until eventually it comes back to me full of grey goodness. We have five artists and we each have a different colour, so I wonder which journal I will get first and what colour it will be?  I like the restriction of only using one colour, it allows me to concentrate on other areas without having to plan a colour palette. I have used Paynes Grey in the book and it looks blue to me, but I am getting away with it because it is officially called ‘grey’ and it is one of my most favorite colours. Also silver counts as grey right!? I can’t wait to paint and draw in everyones …

Get Messy Art 101. Week One.

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This season of Get Messy Art Journal is all about getting down to the art basics and building  repertoire of techniques and ideas.  The first week was no disappointment, there were tutorials in painting faces and creating backgrounds and lots of mini prompts and ideas pouring out of the Get Messy community! I put my spin on a background using watercolor and pulled out my trusty gelli plate to add the wishy washy colour to the pages of my sketchbooks and I also printed onto some pages from a vintage typewriting book. Lots of sketchbooks are essential for me because I always end up starting many pages at the same time and they all need to dry before I carry on to the next layer or page. I tried various colour palettes and I love these backgrounds. I added a page to a page and I will continue to layer onto this spread. These pages started with a self portrait painted on the inside of security envelopes using a sumi brush and black sumi ink. …

Hand Made Journal. Season of Gifts. Get Messy Art Journal.

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Do you make things but deep down think ‘this is not going to work’ ‘I won’t make it the way they do’ ‘this is going to fall apart’? I sometimes do and I did when I embarked on this book.  I was feeling the pressure from the lovely paper I had chosen which I didn’t even want to chop up! I picked up the book called ‘Make your own Ideabook’  by Arne and Carlos from the library and they make bookmaking look so easy.  This is a book with many signatures (books within the book) all sewn together which is something I wanted to have a go at. I have made simple books before which I have hand sewn, but Arne and Carlos use a sewing machine to fasten the pages in each signature.  I was convinced that I would end up perforating the pages and they would pull apart like toilet paper once I had sewn them. Never fear, all went well with the sewing, in fact I also did some random stitching on some …

Get Messy Live!

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“I don’t know anything, ever. I follow fate around” Dirk Gently. This week I went on Facebook ‘Live’ and made some art journal pages alongside and in front of the Get Messy community. It was equally terrifying and great fun! We chatted via comments and I made some pages in various journals, letting one part dry as I hopped to the next and so it went on for about an hour.  The time flew by and I made pages I never planned or expected to make.  Isn’t that the best thing when you start to create and don’t plan the outcome and it still turns out well! It could have gone so horribly wrong so easily! So here are my finished pages, I added very little after the ‘live’ event because I had finished most of them.  I wrote on a couple of the pages and added some doodles here and there. Black gesso and white paint pen over Germany in my ‘atlas’ journal. Neon, stencil and another ‘Dirk Gently’ (written by Douglas Adams) quote …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of Dreams. Week 6.

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Here we are at the final week of Season of Dreams in the Get Messy community and it has been a lovely season even though I remember one dream a month on average! These pages were inspired by the paints and tools I used as much as the dreams theme, I would never have predicted that the last page would have ended up like this when I was painting the galaxy, but I am so happy that it did. The top page is half landscape from a magazine and the other half is black gesso with white pen detail along with white gesso ‘cloud’ detail.  I added the figure and gave her wings.  Then I splattered white ink over the whole spread. The middle page is a base of grey gesso with a collaged figure.  Details are added with more collage, white pen and a neon pen. Finally, I started with a watercolor galaxy all over the spread then I added the figure and gave her wings using a nib pen and ink. The trees …

Art Journal pages. Season of Dreams week 4.

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Do you remember your dreams?  Any recurring dreams? I don’t remember them very well, but I do often dream about being late to catch a train/bus/plane or to an appointment.  In these dreams, I can never run fast or get my phone to work to let anyone know I am running late.  Panic ensues and I wake up feeling stressed. So I made a page with lots of clocks. Whenever I think of catching or recording dreams I immediately think of The BFG by Roald Dahl with his dream catching skills and wonderful language.  I will take a ‘phizzwizard’ please, maybe I will catch it in my net! Get Messy is an online art journaling community full of ideas, techniques and support. Happy Thursday x