Oh Sarah! Part two.

My friend Neet posted earlier about her new addiction - Art Journalling. This is me on the same subject. Oh Sarah! You have led me into a new way of moodling my time away!

We were at a workshop at Paddy's yesterday, and under Sarah Anderson's expert guidance, six of us, i.e. Neet, Sue, Cynthia, Sylvia, Lynne and myself, started to create art journals. This is something I have wanted to do and have been dipping my toe into for ages, partly inspired by seeing one of Sarah's journals before and partly by seeing some of Glenda Waterworth's when I was on the Mixed media course at Graphicus. Both very different, both lovely and inspiring. When I was on the course at Graphicus, I started one which I'm very pleased with, the emphasis being on materials and techniques, naturally, as the course was about just that! I think this type of journal is sometimes called a studio journal.

I also started another one a while ago in which I put pieces of work I've done that illustrate a technique, or combination of materials, colours etc, with a full description or "recipe" so that I can reproduce it later if I want. This is probably a studio journal also.

At Sarah's workshop yesterday she got us to take a more playful approach and cover pages with what we liked, what inspired us etc. We made lists - birds trees dogs chocolate etc - then we started by playing like five-year-olds with big splodges of colour on several pages, using Stewart Gill True Colours which have a lovely matte finish and bright strong colour. Then we stamped over them, added doodles, written journalling, swirls, bits of paper, whatever we liked, in other words collage. I absolutely LOVED it! The freedom Sarah gave us was inspiring, and brought out some gorgeous work in all of us. Pop over to Neet's blog for hers (Hickydorums, see left panel). The main thing is (both Glenda and Sarah said this) - there is no need to finish it now! Just start. Put stuff on pages. One day you'll feel like painting, one day stamping, one day cutting out. One day you'll want to journal about the weather, another day it might be chocolate. So What? Just Do It! The feeling of no need to finish today, or even to have an end in sight, is very liberating.

Anyway, here are pics of a couple of pages of the one done at Sarah's workshop. I have just realised that I didn't post about this aspect of Glenda's, so I'll try and get some pics done tomorrow and post them.

This first one is a double page as you can see, the subject is leaves. Sarah cut some out on her Cricut, I Cuttlebugged some, you can see the leftovers at the top, then I used some as masks to spray paint over. I stamped with some Stamp Bug stamps and some Stamp Man ones, a Tim Holtz one and I doodled a bit. I journalled in some words from a poem I wrote years and years ago about the word "leaves" and it's different meanings and here is the page:-

This single page is about birds as you can see. The little bird that is walking across the bottom is one of the first stamps I ever bought, I have no idea who made it or where I got it, it was in one of those bins where everything is unwrapped and cheap. I loved him then and I still do. The rest of the stamps are from my extensive collection of stamps aquired since featuring birds! The postage stamps were provided by Sarah, originally from a car boot sale apparently!

Anyway I hope you like these pages, I'm opff to bed now as I have akshually been wrkg today between jurnalling, modling and bloging, so am pretty tyred, therefore plz xcs splg!