All posts tagged: Art Journaling

‘I Like’ Friday. The mini journal edition.

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I started working in one of my mini journals today,  and I love it love it love it!  Each page is  a little quick delve into colour, collage and drawing.  I have used acrylic paints which dry nice and quickly, so I can work through the journal without having to wait ages for paint to dry. I started with my new friend, the ‘owlat’ which came about in a previous page and I thought the image looked like a owl crossed with a cat.  I drew this one more deliberately, guiding the triangles as I went. The fold out pages are fun and I tried to make them work with each other and the pages around them by adding a similar flower motif in pen (I used white Uniball and a blue Micron). I am becoming very interested in old photos as well as postcards and this is a copy of a vintage photograph.  I wonder who she was? Collage is a new addition to my art journaling and I am enjoying using snips of …

Art Journaling. Get Messy Season of Gifts Week 5.

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I have been playing in my Season of Gifts journal and it is filling up nicely.  I am doing a horrible job at following any prompts, so the gift I am appreciating is the gift of being able to create these pages and share them with you. Because the journal is all kinds of different papers, not many spreads have the same paper on both sides.  This one has water colour paper on one side which I painted a galaxy using the Liquitex ‘muted’ inks and a white ink as contrast. The other side is the back of the red pattern paper which is really crinkly.  I added my lady and gave her a gold border then I drew with white pen and inadvertently ended up with a cat/owl creature on her headscarf. I have a feeling this character will show up some more now I have ‘invented’ her, I love the idea of an owl/cat creature! This spread is a magazine cutting of a landscape with a gelli print on dry wax paper glued …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of gifts week 3-4.

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This week I met a fellow Get Messy member and it was great!  I am in a couple of groups on Facebook and via the interwebs but I have never met any of them in real life. Now I have! We met at the local library who have a room we could use to art journal and paint and make a mess generally!  They even have drop cloths for the tables to catch our painty inky messes. The time flew by as we made ink galaxies and gelli plate printed backgrounds. I had plans to make journals and all kinds of things, but we ran out of time.  So I will be making some journals this week I think so that I can work in some mini sketchbooks in the new year. I took some dried seeds and botanicals which I had previously gathered on a dog walk through the woods, some printed better than others as is always the way with the gelli plate.  I printed on vintage book paper, kraft paper and dry …

Get Messy Art Journal. Season of Gifts, Week 2.

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We are in the second week of the Season of Gifts over at Get Messy Art Journal.  These are some of my pages from the week. The first two are in two separate journals and the second two are in the journal I made and showed you last week.  I like having the different papers to work over. For this page I scraped some background paint onto my sketchbook, I used gelli prints on dry wax paper to glue over each page.  The dancing swan went in and of course some gold splatters! These trees were finger painted, well the first was and then I squashed the opposite page over the first and made a twin print of the tree.  A gelli print was glued over the spread and I doodled decorations over one tree and things I am grateful for over the other. This spread is in my made journal and I used the same background as the swan page most likely to use up the paint I had on the scraper!  I painted …

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 3.

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We are in the Season of Dreams in the Get Messy Art Journaling community and inspired by the wonderful Tanyalee of The Drawing Board, I created these two pages in my journals. I painted a watercolor wash over some vintage ‘onion skin paper’ which is very thin paper which is slightly wrinkly but I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t completely crinkle when I added the wet paint. Using this paper I cut out circles and butterfly shapes which I layered over the base pages I had created. The top page has a loosely painted self portrait with watercolor splashes which I glued the shapes over. The bottom page is  butterflies glued and layered  along the bottom ‘escaping’ from the darkness of the black gesso. I used a fine black pen to make some outlines and doodles. I have some sheets of watercolor wash left to play with, so I wonder what I will do with them! Happy Friday x        

Paint and Ink in my Art Journal.

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It is week two in the Season of Dreams from the Get Messy Art Journal community and as well as prompt ideas, we have some great tutorials. I often mix ink and paint, but these pages use two different ideas which I interpreted using  acrylic with ink pen and watercolor with a Micron Pigma pen. The first page was a deliberate attempt to finger paint flower shaped images with acrylic paints and when it dried I went into nearly every ‘flower’ with a nib pen and ink to add lots of flowery detail. I approached the second page quite differently, the base layer is a very loose array of watercolour blobs in a minimal colour choice.  Once the colour dried I looked into the images in front of me and pulled out any creatures I could imagine.  I used the colour and the negative space to find lots of imaginary dream-like beings. When I was splashing colour around the page, I was not at all sure what I would find to draw, if anything at …

The ‘Artist’ Zine.

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I have never collaborated in making a zine before, in fact I have only ever seen a zine on the inter webs, never in real life. I was thrilled when I was asked to join in with a zine being made by the Zine Squad who are a group of art journaling ninjas who leap over the rooftops in the dead of night to gather ideas and techniques for their next zine.  So to be included in this group was a real pleasure, even if I need to work on my ninja moves! What I really enjoyed about the zine was that it came to me from Vanessa and Julia who had already worked on some pages.  The idea is to make some new pages or work with other peoples pages while leaving room for the next artist to work her magic. It felt like I could very easily ruin the whole darn thing which took me a few days to get over.  I mean this zine was heading off for other people to work …