Art Journals

Lately I have been looking at my Art Journals and thinking that the covers were very dull, so I decided to bling them up a bit!

This first one is about 8" square, and is about half filled. A few pages have birds or other natural images on them so I wanted to follow on with that, without making the cover another journal page as such. I love adding 3D elements to artwork, but you can't do that too much inside the journal as the pages won't close if you do, so I contented myself with putting them on the cover. The tag was made a few weeks ago using one of TH's Distress Ink / Perfect Pearls techniques, also recently demo'd on C & C. Several bits move or dangle. You can see I am a fan of T. Holtz ideologies!



By contrast this one is very small, 4" approx, and I have kept the decoration very simple. I shall use this one for lettering. I love the beaded trim, (more movement) and the leaves were stencilled through a Stewart Gill stencil with Viva 3D Glitter Gel in Haematite.



I think this next one is my favourite! The journal is about DL size, and I have started using it. I stencilled a design on it with Brilliance Platinum then added some German Scrap. I Glimmer misted the tag, which was black, added a strip of GM'd text from a book in Polish (or it may be Czech I'm not sure as I don't know either language). Then I added a flower made from parts of several other flowers and various metal embellishments including part of an old earring and stuck it on. I stuck a few tiny bits together to make the 3 small pieces across the bottom. Again, a couple of the items move around as you handle the journal.



This last item is for "Stash Lists" as you can see from the front - this has lists of which colours I have in each kind of pad, Alcohol Inks, CB folders and dies I already have etc - with any luck, if I remember to take it with, I shall avoid duplications in future when I go craft shopping!! The book is about A6 size and was shocking pink so I toned it down with white acrylic paint, wrote out the title and added it along with some black lacy braid down the sides. Then I made a tag, using some more of the Polish text. I stuck on some black wired beads from a wedding shop, some T Holtz film strip, a couple of stamped images and some more moveable TH ideologies. And gems. Phew!



When I have finished using the books I shall add ribbons, beads, mini tags etc to the bindings, but it would make them too difficult to use if I did it at this stage!
Hope you like them.

Very big welcome to my new followers - It is very gratifying when people want to see my stuff, thank you so much! Please leave me comments or questions if you have time, I love to know people have been calling in.

Art Journalling yet again

Here is another pair of pages, on the subject of the sea and ships. I am a seasider, or to be more accurate, a sangrownun. Seasider refers to anyone from the Fylde coast, sangrownun is more specifically someone from St. Annes - literally some one ('un) grown on the sand. St. Annes is probably one of the sandiest places outside of an actual desert! Anyway, although there's not a lot of sea there, I spent lots of time in my teens (long ago) in Blackpool where there's loads! At the same time, my dear dear Dad, who is a very gifted artist and sea-lover and ex Royal Navy (WW2) was filling my life and home with pictures and tales of tall ships, my English teacher was filling my head with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and John Masefield and Fleetwood Mac had a hit called Albatross. All the above references can by found in these pages I think. I'm a bit more pleased with the colours here than I tend to be with most of my work. Hope you like them.

Art Journalling

This is another page from my Art journal, which I completed over the last few days. Like others I have become a bit addicted to this, not all pages are OK to share, but I kind of liked this pair, even though the colours are a bit fierce. Somehow they look even fiercer on here than they do in life, which may be something to do with me being an incompetent photographer. The left hand page is just coloured with spray inks, mainly Glimmer Mists but ther are some Sticky Fingers inks in there too. I sprayed a couple of colours then dried them with a heat gun before spraying any more, to try and avoid either muddiness, or the page becoming soggy! Then when completely dry I added a few splodges of yellow emulsion paint to provide a contrast in texture. The frilly ribbon was aquired in a strange shop somewhere I know not where - I think it was an ironmongers, somewhere in Yorkshire. It's actually elastic with coloured organza and the colours were just right for my page! The facing page has a stamp from Tim Holtz about creativity, and the images tell the story that he tells in the words - the stuck on embroidered flowers represent the safety of the comfort zone, and the wierd flowers stamped and stencilled around the edge are supposed to be the wilderness where you find yourself. I am represented in there somewhere!

Hope you like them.

Art journals again- my new addiction...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had also started a journal at the Mixed Media course at Graphicus back in April. It didn't need much doing to it, and I have now been spurred on to finish it. Here it is, not all the pages photographed very well, particularly the darker ones, so this is just a selection. The thing with this one is, a lot of it is about texture and dimension, hard to capture in a 2D medium like photos!

And can ayone tell me why on earth these photos come out in a column like this? I'm sure I've got them to spread around a bit better before! Very frustrating ....