This month’s theme for the last art journal session of the year is ‘Christmas NBU’. A long while ago, I suggested the tag #nbu for ‘never been used’. I’m not sure it caught on… So this wintery layout uses items that have not been used yet alongside other bits and bobs that came to hand:
I’ve been playing with more dry embossing for Day 2 of the Online Card Class; Extraordinary Embossing Folders. For these cards, I have used inks in different ways with the folders, playing with contrast and the debossed and embossed sides. There was also a technique using shadow word dies, but I don’t have any of those. Instead, I created the same effect with my Silhouette Cameo and laser cutter using cardstock and an offset set of text:
It has been a little while since I have shared one of my art journal spreads, so I thought I would do so today as a plug for next week’s art journaling session here at The Studio. I’m also sharing the stages the layout went through to get from where I started to the finished article. ‘Maps’ is the theme this month and you’re very welcome to join us on Monday at 7:30pm for the session where you will create your own take on the theme. All materials are provided, and you can get a suitable journal from me for just £2 if you don’t have one already. Just let me know if you’d like to attend. Here’s my finished layout:
Challenge time again at Less is More, the clean and simple challenge blog. This time, it’s a colour challenge: use pale blue and yellow, and black and white are allowed. It took me a little while to come up with my design – a couple of the design team had already posted their cards and I didn’t want to do the same or a similar card. Here’s my final take on the challenge:
Over on the Less is More challenge blog this week is a lucky dip and from the pot came the chalkboard technique. In essence, this uses white pigment ink on black card, with the option of adding white heat embossing for even more contrast. An example video is available at the end of this post.
Three cards for you today in reverse order…
I’m a fan of Finnabair and her combination of collage and assemblage in her mixed media pieces. There are numerous other artists following the style, and plenty of videos on YouTube showing step-by-step ways of working. Silly old me – I watched one and thought I could remember it as I did my own… This wasn’t the case, so this is pretty much all my own work. It’s the result of a couple of hours work, including cutting out the various chipboard/greyboard elements with my laser cutter. I’ve chucked everything at it!
I don’t experiment much in my art journal any more, which is a shame. I have developed a style and, generally, keep to it with occasional variations. This week, I was inspired by the work of one of my colleagues at That’s Crafty!, Lynne Moncrieff. She has a wonderful grunge style that uses nature as inspiration, developing textures and colours from natural inks, pigment crystals and sprays.
So I raided the tea bag waste bin for old tea bags and reached for the sprinkles. And learnt that I need to do far more experimentation with both! The pages started to come together with the various bits of ephemera and using some tea bag paper to mount them on. It finally knit together with a healthy dose of vintage photo distress ink and oxides.
But what to write? Well, having done so, I wish I hadn’t! I found a fountain pen and filled it with sepia ink – but of course, it didn’t really like the gessoed page. Tracing over it with a cocktail stick dipped in the same ink gave a much better finish, so next time I’ll go straight to that. I recovered slightly by spritzing with water – the smudging and feathering is now deliberate rather than accidental 😉 Continue reading
The first Monday of the month sees my monthly art journal evening at the Studio, and next week the theme is ‘never been used’. I’ve asked studio guests to bring something from their crafty stash that they have never used, and we’ll be incorporating them into our beautiful art journal pages.
In prepping my sample for the session, I came across an embarrassment of unused kit deep in folders, drawers and baskets. I think I will need to do more of these! I know I’m not alone, so what do you think – anyone fancy a ‘never been used’ challenge blog?
Here’s my show page, worked in my very first art journal from 2011 on a background that I’d not yet used:
It was a ‘watersolubles’ theme at Art Journaling last night. In between diagnosing a broken Mac (it was one of the RAM cards that died) and having the car serviced (it was a VW diesel engine…), I grabbed an hour or so to do an inspiration page:
It reminded me that all watersolubles are not created equal, with some water-soluble wax crayons barely moving when wetted, even on watercolour paper, and others wandering off and doing their own thing quite happily. It also is worth noting that, to get best effects, you should gesso or otherwise seal your journal page unless working in a watercolour paper journal.
In the above example, I used the blues on watercolour paper before drying and cutting out the letters on my Silhouette Cameo. The background is a combination of colour and graphite watersolubles over gesso, overprinted with acrylic paint. Handwritten text and outlines finished off the layout.
For my next trip abroad, I wanted to make another travel journal. I have previously handmade a small hardback pocket journal and a fold-out accordion journal. This time I decided to make a handmade journal using a piano hinge. This, for the unfamiliar, uses tabs and cylindrical objects (in this case bamboo skewers) to attach the pages at the spine. The benefit for a travel journal is that every other spread is the depth of the bamboo skewer, which means there is plenty of room for additional items of collage and other ephemera, and pockets to store memorabilia. It’s also possible to easily disassemble the book at the hinge to work on individual pages, or remove and add pages as required.
Constructed from canvas textured acrylic paper, I knocked back the white using an off-white chalky finish acrylic paint. I added a darker shade at the base of each page, using the same paint to stencil the building outlines. Overprinting with various travel oriented stamps using archival ink completed the decoration. It seems that the convention for piano hinge books is that the spine is visible, and the skewers extend from the bottom and the top. I wanted a more traditional book appearance as well as a protective cover, so I constructed cover pages before covering them with lokta paper which resembles old leather. A few coats of soft-touch varnish added to that illusion as well as protecting the paper. Adding this type of cover does restrict the addition of further pages. As I intend to use this on the flight as well, I thought it wise to trim the skewers… Some care needs to be taken to keep the pages vertically aligned, but in practice friction seems to keep the posts in place.
