All posts tagged: Get Messy

Get Messy – Season of Colour Week 4.

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Lots of colour play this week, using a few colours and using lots.  I learnt that I don’t love using yellow! I painted on these vintage library catalogue cards using a very marvelous tutorial and idea from Julia via the Get Messy members blog. What to do with the cards now? I added two of them to a page I started in my Season of Colour journal (made from paper bags and atlas pages).  This page was a fighter, I almost painted ‘I hate this page’ all over it at one point (I am not even a little bit joking!). But I persevered and after a slice of orange in my corner, I jumped back into the ring and finished the page. I am so pleased that I didn’t scribble all over the page in a tantrum! Happy Thursday x

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 …

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 Season of Contrast, Week 3.

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I let this page guide me as I made it and I love how it turned out.  Almost the opposite to last week where I layered and layered, this page has lots of white space left which I like. I started by making some plain gelli plate prints using the colours I had chosen.  I printed blocks of colour on dry wax paper and old book pages.  Once I had my pages I cut out some shapes as neatly as I could and I tore some shapes to contrast. I wove the green and aqua torn strips, both of which were on wax paper to make the grid on the right page above. The aqua circles are torn out and also printed on dry wax paper. The copper and gold shapes are cut with scissors and were printed on the book paper. I like to see the pages close up, the gelli plate gives an interesting print even with one or two colours. Thanks to Get Messy Art Journal and Jules Tea for the inspiration! …

Intuitive Painting – what a process!

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Today I tried a new thing in my giant Moleskine art journal which is A3 size and perfect for something like intuitive painting which I haven’t really done before.  I don’t often know where a page is heading when I start and I rarely make layers and layers of paint and techniques. I am a single layer painting kinda girl, I might draw or collage on top of that layer, but that is more than likely going to be it. The end. Finished page. So of course I was keen to try some intuitive painting as featured in this week’s Get Messy tutorial. The main aim is to use lots of colour and supplies and equipment and make layers, all of the layers. Random is not my top skill, I always end up making things balance or matching the colours or following a pattern even when I think I am not going to. Part way through the layers for my ‘intuitive’ art journal painting, I thought that maybe I could do a layer of images …

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 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. …

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 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 …

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 …