On Monday evening, it’s the monthly art journal session at The Studio. The theme for the session is ‘faux patchwork’, and here’s my sample. Quilting meets paper craft and art journaling.
Just so you know, there is no fabric, padding or indeed cotton/thread on this page. Everything you see is flat and stuck onto the page.
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This Monday, the art journal session at The Studio has the theme ‘perfect palettes’. For this journal prompt, I picked a colour chart from the ever fabulous design-seeds.com and did my best to match the palette. Of course, this was a little harder when printing out the image – the printer colours aren’t a good reproduction.
And here’s the resulting page (and don’t forget that the colours changed again when I scanned it in…). So the palette isn’t exact, but, as with all journal prompts, it’s what sparks the rest of the page. I also chose the theme to help those who struggle to know what colours might work together.
I recently took delivery of a new Dylusions art journal – the 8×5″ landscape format – and last night I took the opportunity to experiment with a 3×5″ Gelli plate and some DecoArt fluid acrylics. Bubble wrap of two sizes and a mosaic stencil added a bit of pattern, and then rubber stamping with acrylic paint added the highlights. Finally, some cut letters as masks and a sponged layer of acrylic paint finished off the page nicely.
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I promised to share my ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ technique for acrylic covers that didn’t quite get finished on air during my last Hochanda shows for That’s Crafty!. Below are some instructions along side the pics I took prior to the shows, and below those is a short video I have done to try and explain it a little more clearly! Apologies for the outside noises on the video – they’re wind chimes and a radiator warming up, if you’re wondering.
I was on Hochanda this week demonstrating techniques for using the acrylic covers effectively, for the A4 and A6 journals from That’s Crafty!. As always, there is too little time on air to fit in all my ideas, and only just enough time to fit in all I had planned! What follows below are photos and quick explanations of how to do your own. I really need to remember to take step-by-step photos as I make so that I can do a proper tutorial post! First is an unbroadcast cover, then the mirrored cover that didn’t go so right when rushed, and last for this post is the bubbling water effect shown in my first hour.
Later this week I will do a separate post explaining my ‘now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t’ technique that was a wee bit rushed at the end of the second show:
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’s taken some time, but I’ve finished the journal I handmade last year and finally got round to taking and editing the photos of the finished article. I intended to journal each day before going to bed, but got a little behind whilst in New York as our room was so small that there was actually nowhere to work on a flat surface, and there was no communal area I could use either. Consequently, by the time I got to Boston, and there was space to work, I was already five days behind. Then life on the road for the final few days also meant I was doing other things at the end of each day. So it meant finishing off the work once I got home, but that brought back good memories of a lovely, and much needed, holiday.
As a format, the piano hinge worked very well – I was able to slide out each of the sticks in turn to work on the pages individually, which was far easier. The fold out sections added a little more space, and the wallets somewhere to put the various bits of ephemera that I collected along the way. With techniques from collage to napkin decoupage, hand drawn typography to watercolour illustrations, it was fun to put together. I would have liked to do more urban drawing, but for speed, mini-photos had to suffice.
Sit back, with a cuppa of your choice, and holiday vicariously as you work through the journal 🙂
Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that I have been spending quite a lot of time making samples and prepping demos for my shows on Hochanda last Friday. It’s one reason that there have been very few blog updates recently, as there’s always a media embargo on sharing things before the shows go out. Now that they’re over though, here is one of the 8×8″ journals I decorated for the occasion.
Each spread uses the Pentart Matt Acrylic Paints in a baby-wipe swiped layer, stamped and stencilled, to give a tone-on-tone effect. Some worked well (purple and orange), others not so well (mentioning no names, green). The fine applicator nib is great for painting outlines and letters, as I demonstrated on air.
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.
At today’s bas relief cards workshop, I did the unthinkable (for me at least) – worked on a technique and a sample alongside a workshop guest, without trying it first weeks before. And despite the gung-ho attitude, we both ended up with, even if we do say so ourselves, a cracking outcome. There was something rather pleasing about making a 2D stamped image a little more 3D, smudging and smoothing paper clay into place before letting the stains and paint do their thing.
