The final colour me positive pages for this year.

These are the final two pages for my journal.

 Week 51 was inspired by the old keys my husband gave me. I had to stitch them to the page to make sure they didn't fall off. I made a raised frame for the quote so the whole page had the same level of thickness for my book.

 Week 52 is really the title page for the book. I decided I needed one so this is at the  beginning of the book. I collaged down some printed deli papers to my page.

 I wanted to add lettering that I could doodle inside of so I used a stencil for the letters. Firstly I stenciled the words onto tracing paper so I could see if they would fit and where the best placement would be.

 I used this Deja Vue stencil for the letters. It is a little hard to see here but I used pencil for the outlines. I didn't want to use pen because the surface is a little rough and the pen would have got caught on the textured surface and skipped about.

After I removed the stencil I went over the outline with pen. I was a little easier to control without the stencil in the way. 

Next I used India ink to color in the negative space of the page, blending from one color to the next. You can still see the original background in the letters.  At this stage it is still a little messy.

The finished page. I added lines and doodles around the different colors with a black and a white pen. I felt that this brings the whole page together and it is fun to do. In the next post I will share the video of the journal binding.

Some of the last journal pages for this year.

These are the final pages for my year long journal.

 Week 42 is quite a simple page. I used acrylic paint for the background then added gesso stamped circles. I was in the mood for some doodles so I added the quote and then doodled the night away. It was fun to do.

 Week 43 was a fast page. I had previously glued paper napkins to the background so I used 2 stencils for apply paint. When it was dry I used a gold pen to add a quote.

 Week 44 is a collage over a blue painted background. I colored the rainbow with pencils to make it bolder.

 Week 45 is a collage from painted papers. I already had the flower petals cut out so that was the start of the idea for this one.

 Week 46 is yet another collage. I didn't know I had done so many collages this year. I painted all the leaves with one stroke of paint and outlined them.

 Week 47 was an attempt to be a little more free with my style but it is still a fairly neat and tidy design.

Week 48 was inspired by a picture I saw in a magazine. I just loved the black background that made the colors pop. It too has a lot of doodles. 

Week 49 is a workshop I bought from the Cloth Paper Scissors website. It was called Spirograph designs mixed media.

Week 50 is another collage but this one uses a grid format. I did each part of the grid separately and then stitched them all together on my page. I really love this one and can see I will do more things like this in the future.

I hope you enjoy these shared pages. My next blog post will be a brief demo of a doodle page and then I will share the video of how to put these pages together.

Art journalling is one of my year long projects.

This year I have become very involved with my textile group, teaching and working on the committee side of things so it has kept me busy. I have been creating art but not posting so now that my lessons have finished you can expect a lot more sharing from me.

I have been keeping up with my commitment to the Colour me positive challenge and have created a journal page a week. This year I have been experimenting with a lot of different techniques in my journal and as I look through the 30 pages created so far I can see a definite style is there in each technique. I always seem to do neat, graphic style work with simple backgrounds.

 Week 21- Gratitude. I collaged on deli papers that had been previously printed then I carved some stamps and used them to start this uneven grid style page. The stars, heart in a square and square star are all stamps I made. The rest of the page is drawn and coloured with paint pens. 

Week 22 - Creativity. I used a white wax crayon to draw the houses then filled them with india inks and let them blend together. It was a really fast, fun technique and I love the finished effect. 
 

 Week 23 - Attitude. I was cleaning up and found some cut outs I did for an older journal so I used them to make this simple page. The background is tissue paper and paint.

 Week 24 - What soothes your soul? For me it has to be music that has the most effect on my moods. There is nothing like putting a great song on really loud and singing along. It always makes a dark day brighter. I cut the words from scrapbooking papers and glued them to a previously painted background.

 Week 25 - This week I used the quote supplied and the extra challenge to create a silhouette. I still struggle when it comes to drawing the side profile.

Week 26 - Learning new things. The prompt this week was very appropriate for me as I spent the week away at a textile art retreat learning new things. I made a simple page about the retreat that was Fibres West. I will shortly do a post about the work we did there.

Colour me positive

I have been doing a bit of art journaling for the Colour me Positive challenge at Lulu art. The link is in the sidebar if you want to get more details of the challenge. There is a weekly prize offered for one of the people who upload their creations to Facebook.  I have been enjoying doing more art journaling again.

Week 5 - The challenge this week was a funny quote about body image. I chose this quote because I recently lost a lot of weight and body image has been on my mind often. I used small stickers I had painted previously for embellishments over printed papers. It was a very quick page to do. 

 Week 6 - Acrylics for background and underpainting hands, then stamped texture (blue). I used coloured pencils to add the detail to the painted hands and feet.

 Week 7 - I made a patchwork of painted papers for his shell then stitched them together on my machine. The sky was painted then covered with plastic wrap and left to dry to create the texture. The path is painted tissue paper.

 Week 8 - I wanted to add a flap to my page this week so I could show one of my early portraits compared to a newer one. I got a little carried away with the white pen. The two faces were printed photos of previous work that I glued in.

 
This shows the opened page. I used acrylic paint, some rub ons and a lot of white pen.

Experimenting again with fabric paper.

I forgot to share the fabric paper experiments I made when I was testing the technique so here they are...

This first one has the wrapping paper underneath but I turned some of it over to the plain white side to make a checkerboard pattern. I did more machine stitching on this sample. I used a different tissue here and you can see some of it tore when it was wet. If you are going to paint over it later on that probably wouldn't matter, or it could be just the look you are trying to achieve.  Experiment with small samples of what you have before you start a big project.

 In these samples I used different paints on top to see how they would cover the design underneath. The gold is Lumiere paint and the other two samples are Golden artist acrylic. I put them on thinly so there was still some transparency.

This sample is the same paper as above but I used Silks acrylic glaze by Dreaming Color on top. It is more opaque than I thought it would be but is metallic so very shiny. It is an interesting effect. I also tested some Viva Inka-gold paint along one edge. 

So what can you do with all this fabric paper?  I made a grid style collage.

I used the fabric paper as the background and for some of the individual rectangles. I was testing out some ideas for my textile group's current challenge using recycled materials. Can you spot the pull tabs that have been embossed near the bottom left? I also have a bread tag on there, an old ice cream stick and an old bluebird earring that has lost it's mate. I raided my stash for a few extra embellishments and charms. I added beads, sequins, machine and hand stitching.  I like the way it turned out so I am going to do something similar for my challenge piece.

I did it as two journal pages so I can make a fabric art journal because I have run out of wall space to put all my art now. I will be adding pages throughout the year.

Relaxing with doodles

Adult coloring books are the latest craze at the moment. People find it relaxing to sit a color. I remember the coloring doodle books that were big when I was a teenager. They were the same thing and I loved filling them in. These days I would prefer to do my own form of doodling and that is what I am sharing today. It is  a technique that I started with CathyB during 21 secrets and I have adapted it to suit my own creative style.

 
I started by collecting a big bunch of papers from my collection. I had a lot of prints from my gelli plate and printing class. I used some computer printouts of my own work that didn't print properly and a few pieces of paper that had been under my work to catch excess paint. There is even a piece of scrapbook paper there. You could also use magazine pages that have a lot of color on or catalogue pages. I tore them into smaller pieces but you could cut them if you want to.

For my journal I am using a small magazine insert, about 6 by 8 inches but it could be any size you like. I had read it and didn't want to keep it so I am giving it a new life as my doodle journal. You could use any book or journal you want to. The collage adds thickness and strength to the pages so it doesn't have to be thick paper.

I used acrylics to paint each page. It doesn't matter what you use because most of it will be covered over anyway but the paint adds a bit of strength to the page before the papers are glued in and seals the paper. I painted every second page one day then let it dry a day before painting all the other pages. You need to let the pages dry like this or they may tear.

When the paint was dry I decided that I wanted to do backgrounds of either warm or cool colors. This page is mostly cool colors but there are some little spots of warm here and there. I just lay out the pieces and move them around until I get an arrangement I like. It usually only takes a couple of minutes to do this.

I glued all the pieces of paper down with Liquitex matte medium. I don't worry if the edges are straight or if all the background is covered. The paint on this page was the purple color you can still see in places. I let the papers hang over the edge of the pages and later trim them to size when dry.

I did all the pages like this doing cool and warm backgrounds. The glue was drying quick enough so I could go onto the next page but I did put a piece of wax paper between the pages just in case they wanted to stick together. Then I left the whole book to dry again, standing it up so the pages would not stick together and the air could get in there.

The final step before the doodling begins is to glue in images I have cut from magazines. I used flowers on these pages but I also chose birds and other images. I just choose images that I really like and want to save before I throw a magazine away.

I usually put the warm images on the cool backgrounds and vice versa. It makes the flowers stand out more. I did that to the whole journal so now when I feel like making some art  and don't have a big project to work on, I have a book of half done pages to get me started. 

This page is done on the cool purple background that I showed above. I add washi tape (because I have a lot of it) over the edge of the papers to make a grid for doodling. I also added a few deli paper hearts that were left over from some other project and a few small stickers (circles, hearts, stars and words). Finally I get out a bunch of acrylic paint pens and gel pens and doodle all over everything. I added leaves to the flowers with the paint pens. Some of the washi tape is colored in, some of it is left plain. I outline almost everything with black pen and add a lot of white highlights. Sometimes I use markers to change the color of something. You can have a lot of fun with this technique. You can do a formal grid or let items overlap each section like I have.

I hope you enjoy being creative over the holidays and have a great time with friends and families. I will return in the new year with some more art. Have fun.

A new journal page.

Today I am sharing a journal page I did for the Documented Life Project. The art challenge was to use tissue paper and the prompt was 'disappearing trick'.

I found a quote that I liked so that inspired me to do a flower garden. I searched through my stash of printed tissue paper but couldn't find any nice flowers that I wanted to use so I looked through my napkin collection (every art stash hoarding journaler has one, don't they?). I chose a few different napkins and tore the flowers out. I did trim around some of the flowers with scissors.

I first painted my page with white gesso then sprayed on colour with the dylusions spray. When it was all dry I arranged my flower cut outs to look like a garden bed.  I used matte medium to glue down the napkins and left it to dry.

 Uh oh. I knew that the napkins would become transparent when glued down but I didn't expect the dylusions spray that was mixed with the gesso to become bright green and change the flower colours. It was difficult to make out the flowers now so I decided to colour over everything with my prismacolor pencils. I was hoping the creamy wax pencils would cover up a lot of that green and also make the flowers more prominent. I also added some extra leaves in the blank areas and extended the flower stems so they reached the bottom of the page. It was a lot of fun to colour this way. Now I am happy that the page looks the way I imagined. 

 I will share some of my other pages and art I have been working on soon. I am planning to update my blog on Tuesdays from now on so that it forces me to be more regular about updating. I may even add extra posts in between but don't hold me to that.

Week 3 - Index Card a Day

The overall theme this week was maps. I haven't really played with maps before and this week I got to see that is a great creative tool.

Prompt - stickers.  I simply used letter stickers on a map of the area where I live. After I did this card I realised that almost all of my adult memories are contained within the area shown. I think it will make a great journal page with a lot more highlights.

 
Prompt - roll the dice.  This card didn't work out the way I imagined but I didn't want to do it over.   I drew a lot of dice on the card then covered it with a stencil of a map. There wasn't enough black so I did the stencil twice and now wish I hadn't. It is a bit dark for me. I will try something like this again though.

Prompt - polka dots.  I punched dots out of a map and stuck them onto an acrylic painted background.

Prompt - orange.  I used watercolors to draw an aerial map of an imaginary orange farm.

Prompt - was Harry Potter but I wanted to do a map of my street.  I did rough sketches of all the houses and colored them with watercolors.

Prompt - candy wrapper.  I used chocolate wrappers glued to stiff paper. I traced the states of Australia and cut them out.

Prompt - repeating pattern.  I used punches and maps to make my repeating pattern.  I added a watercolor shadow around each shape to make it 3D.

This was a fun week and great inspiration for several art journal pages in the future.

ICAD week 2

 The overall theme for the second week of ICAD was collage. It is something I like to try occasionally but not really a favorite technique for me. I do like using these challenges to force me to try different techniques, otherwise I would just sketch or paint everything.

Prompt - mandala.  I have never been a fan of mandalas so this was a challenge for me. I used punches to cut shapes out of magazine pages. Some of them are layered. I put the tiny star shapes on top of some of the circles and also used them for the centers of the orange flowers shapes around the edge. The centerpiece is two cut out stars over a circle cut out.  I used a little white pen to add some extra details. The hardest part was gluing down all the pieces.

 Prompt - alphabet. I was making soup last week so the idea of alphabet soup popped into my head.  I cut a picture of soup from a magazine and put it onto a plain background. The letters were added with rub-ons. I did color some of the letters with marker to make them look like they were in the soup. 

Prompt - The Beatles.  I scanned a strawberry painting I had done years ago and printed it out several times.  I cut out the strawberries and glued them to the card.

Prompt - toy camera.  I imagined the photos you might see taken with a toy camera. I used magazine images to make the pictures and added childlike writing.

Prompt - paisley.  This is probably my least liked textile pattern. I think it has to do with the paisley quilt I had as a child.  I kept this card simple and used scrapbook paper and letters.  Another thing gone from my stash.

No prompt for this one.  I just felt like doing a torn collage landscape.  I have been using an old Somerset Studio magazine for most of my collage this week. It is great to get pieces of paper that look like I have painted them. I colored the edge of the torn paper with a brown watercolor crayon, it helps tie the whole thing together. 

Prompt - magenta.  I tore out petals and centers from my magazine.  To get the petal shape I tore around my finger at the top and then tore the sides in a bit. For the centers I used a pencil to draw an oval on the back and tore along the line.  I added a little fine-liner around the centers and for the border. Simple but interesting to look at. I may turn this one into a series of journal pages in different colors, it is my favorite type of collage.

If you haven't started Index Card a Day it is not too late to join in the fun.