All posts tagged: catseatdogsgetmessy

Handmade sketchbook for the Season of Nature

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I am beginning to get a bit obsessed with making books!  I love to make all the sketchbooks with different papers in different sizes with fold outs and accordions.  The more I make the more ideas I get for another one or two or three. We are about to start the new season over in the Get Messy Art Journal community and it is going to be The Season of Nature.  I found a book called ‘A Field Guide to Animal Tracks’ not long ago and thought it would be perfect to make into a sketchbook for The Season of Nature. Once the pages were out I was ready to go! I made two signatures and stitched one to each inside cover of the book so they open away fro each other.  I used pamphlet stitch to fasten them onto the edge of the cover. I have made a pretty backwards book which started by stitching the papers onto the opposite side than expected, but I like the way the two books are working together …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of Fairytales. Week Three.

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Week three of the season of fairytales and I am still enjoying filling my little handmade journal.  What I have learnt is that I like to work bigger, this journal was dictated by the size of the book covers I chose, but every time I open it, I wish it was bigger.  We live and lean don’t we?! I did buy a big fat old book this weekend from the local YMCA book fair, which I want to make into a sketchbook full of watercolor paper, but that is another story which I will share when I make it. At the same book fair I also bought a couple of fairytale books which I am using for collage material.  I seem to have landed on The Frog Prince as my fairytale of choice so I am keeping all my book pages from that story. I have been following the daily prompts on Creative Bug this month and today’s was to make a poem from found words. So I pulled a couple of pages from The …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of Fairy Tales. Week 2.

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I really got stuck into the season of fairy tales this week, and I have made a good start in my hand made journal as well as some off-shoot ideas in my giant Moleskine. Rather than follow any fairy tale in particular, I am making my pages with the general theme in mind and as a guide rather than a director. I have lots of golden circles reflecting the golden ball from The Frog Prince and this week I have painted castles and trees which I see more of in this journal as they were lovely to paint and sparked many more ideas as I created them. I made a falling triangle stencil and painted it in a bright opera pink on a vellum page in my journal.  I like this simple but striking page over the watery trees and inky castle. I may draw in some details to my castle but for now, I like it as it is. Castles and forests and golden balls. My week in fairy tale art journaling. Happy Thursday …

Get Messy Season of Colour

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You know when you have a fancy box of chocolates and you want to just dive in and try them all, but you know you need to use restraint and savor each one.  Well, this is how I am feeling this week in the Get Messy Season of Colour.  Firstly there are some great prompts which I want to try out, then I looked at the website last night and there are three new tutorials I have not looked at yet. Yikes! I want to quickly zip into each one and see what it is about, but I also want to allow myself the time to read and look at each one and of course have a go at the artistic wonders that lie within! Before I take a run up and jump off the high board, here is my season of colour journal so far. I have taken a different approach this season, not deliberately, it just happened as do all good things in my art journals. One evening on holiday, the boys all …

Painted paper collage

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My new favourite thing is paining block colours onto plain or old book paper, cutting out random shapes and making a collage from them. I don’t use purples very much so I decided to paint some blocks of colour onto some slightly textured paper (This is Sumi-E painting and sketch paper) overlapping the colours slightly but not particularly deliberately.  Of course I had to throw in some gold and paynes grey. Once they were super dry, I cut them into shapes and strips of paper. I really love how the overlap and edges of the colour look so effective once they are in shapes. Then the fun part, sticking the shapes down on a page (in this case, my daily Moleskine). I try and keep a balance of white space and shapes as well as a balance of colour placement. I had swashed some gold over the page already so I stuck the shapes over the gold. I can’t wait to do this again as I have lots of paper and shapes left.  Maybe next …

Get Messy Season of Contrast Week 6

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The last week of the Season of Contrast has come around so quickly. There have been so many great ideas through the prompts and tutorials, I have not kept up, but that just means a wealth of ideas for me to try in future pages. I am new convert (as of a few hours ago) to paper weaving.  The effects are amazing and I am so new to it, most of what I have done so far (see above) came mainly as a surprise. The process for me is still evolving, but I am loving it so far.  I applied a little planning and then let the papers do the work. For the weaving I used magazine pages and images, a vintage dictionary page and a 1950’s accounts ledger book as well as a painted page from an old book. None of it has made it to my journal yet, the ledger will stay as it is and I may add to the page, but it could be finished now in my opinion. Thanks to …

Get Messy Season of Contrast Week 5

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I set out this week to follow some ideas from the tutorials over at the Get Messy website as well as a prompt or two.  I even wrote down some ideas of things I could do in my sketchbooks. Lots of contrast was achieved I think and I almost managed to leave part of a page blank, but I ended up with some gold and a black gesso ‘hole’ on it instead. I had a go at contrasting patterns in my mini Moleskine and a page of black and a page of white with a little red flower. There are some contrasting colours on the last page which is in my ‘The Shape of Towns’ altered book and I decided to cut a circle out of one page to reveal the head of a statue on the previous page.  Of course once I had the head, I had to sketch in the rest of the statue onto my page. I wandered off from the prompts a little and even got distracted from the tutorial I …

Get Messy Season of Contrast week 4 and rediscovering art supplies.

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Isn’t it strange how seeing things or using things within a different context alters your approach and attitude? I have been whining on about how I never know how to use inks and I can’t get to grips with them especially acrylic inks.  I really want to use them because they have such great colours but I don’t know how – whah whah whah. Today I watched the lovely Amy Maricle on the Get Messy tutorial page demonstrating a lovely technique using circles on a journal page.  She uses Neocolor II crayons and I only have Neocolor I which are the oil pastels and not at all what we need for this.  So I racked my brain, do I have anything else I could use? Way back when I was a twenty something fashion student, I used some chunky water soluble crayons which I adored, so I went to dig them out. In the same shoe box they were stored in were some card making supplies I used to make little cards to sell and …

Get Messy Art Journaling. Season of Contrast Week 1.

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For this first week of Season of Contrast at Get Messy I have taken contrast to the extreme and used only black and white! I have enjoyed working with black ink, black gesso and white gesso so far, with a little addition of Posca pen to make the dots on the ombre spread and the details on the next spread.  I tried some ink blots and then couldn’t stop making them!! I find the ink blots mesmerizing to make and to stare at.  All kinds of things pop out of the page.  I always see lots of faces.   For sketchbooks, I  used my giant Moleskine which opens A2 size, medium Moleskine which is A3 when open and my mini Moleskine which is A5 open.  All the sizes! I really like the small gelli prints of fern leaves in my mini book. Prints were made on vintage dictionary paper and dry wax paper as well as directly into my sketchbooks. I think I will leave some of these prints and blots alone and some I …

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 …