A little bit dotty...

I've got a new project up at the Stampotique Designer's Blog this week and the theme this time is polka dots:

 

I decided to do an art journal page. I've had a painty background sitting in my moleskine journal ever since I did a class with Kate Crane oooooog ages ago now, and decided it was long since time I did something with it. :)

 

I started off by adding layers of paint and texture paste through a stencil for a polka-dotty pattern and then stamped some circles using black paint and various bottle tops. I added some Pan Pastels here and there in the stamped circles and over the texture paste. I then stamped around the edges with the Splatter Long (3014) stamp.

 

I stamped the Jeepers face onto scrap paper and drew on a body. I also stamped Bla Bla Bla (6001) across the body. I then coloured her in with Promarkers and cut her out to attach her to my page.

 

To finish I had wrote journaling and cut it into strips, edging them with black pen before affixing to the page.

I love the bright colours and business of this page... which ties in perfectly with my journaling... which is a pretty accurate description of my life right now! :lol:

My first attempt...

...at a Suzi Blu-stylee girl. :)

 

 

My mum pretty much always asks me what she can get me for Christmas/birthday so this year I emailed her a short list of a few mixed media/art journalling books I'd been lusting after on Amazon and she bought me two of them... one of them being Mixed Media Girls with Suzi Blu.

 

So as we're having a fairly lazy day today, huddled in the lounge/study (the only two rooms with gas fires) while the plumber works to fix our central heating boiler, I thought I'd get out pen and paper and have a go.

 

I quite like Suzi's technique for drawing and shading faces and luckily faces are the one thing that I am quite good at drawing. I used to draw a LOT when I was a child/teenager and faces were what I drew most... in fact, whilst at school I drew portraits of just about everybody in my class! I'd get them to sit and pose for me! :lol:

 

So I do feel like I have a bit of a head start here because I'm not starting completely from scratch, as it were. Nevertheless, I am rather pleased with my first attempt.

 

Next step will be to clear enough space in my craft room (once the heating is working again cos it gets chillllllly in there! :lol:) and start playing with some mixed media backgrounds to go with my faces. :)

 

WOYWW 161

Yargh. What you see on my desk this morning is an exercise in frustration.

You see, I recently bought a rather funky looking doily die. "How fabulous!" thought I. "I can make doiles to match my projects, as many of  them as I like! Yippee!"

Or... not. Now, it's an intricate die and I'm not daft... I realised there would be some work involved in popping out all the teeny tiny little pieces. However, as it turns out, there's a lot more to it than "popping out"... mainly because even after being run through the BigShot twice (turning 90 degrees between runs through), the darn thing *still* didn't cut completely through in places. So I've ended up having to push and pull with a pokey tool, and occasionally try and re-cut lines with a craft knife, and generally it's taken me faaaaaar longer than I even care to think about to produce just one usable doily (and I wouldn't look too closely at it as there's a fair few ragged edges here and there).

So that's what I've been doing at my craft desk - that and a lot of swearing! :lol

So, to end on a more cheerful note, I shall also share with you the finished CJ page that I made using the background that was sitting on my desk in last week's WOYWW post:

I used a Dylusions stencil and a Stempelgelde stamp and handwrote the journalling. The CJ is now winging its way to the next recipient.

And that's it from me this week. I've stayed up faaaaar too late (or early, really) fighting with that doiley so I am taking myself off to bed! :)

WOYWW 161

For once, I actually have a work in progress to show you on my desk this week! :) For some reason, on Wednesday mornings my desk always seems to be either completely covered in (often non-craft related) bumf, sorely neglected, or, more usually, showing only the debris of a recently-completed project. But not this week. :D

Today was the UKS sponsor blog hop and what a fine hop it was! Some fantastic projects and inspiring ideas... and one of them - some textured background tutorial vids from Just Scrapbooking - inspired me to get my paints out. Something I've not done for far too long!

As it happens, I have an entry to do in an art journal CJ, so what better excuse to get painty? :)

So here's the desk this morning:

And here's my painty, texturey background:

It's still a work in progress in that I still need to "decorate" the page, as it were. But I'm quite happy with the background.

That's it from me this week. Short and sweet. I've already stayed up later than I should cos DD1 has recently taken to waking up a good hour or so earlier than she usually does *and* coming and opening her bedroom door and making a noise on the landing, which then wakes up her baby sister in her room, which in turn means that mummy's then got to get up at silly o'clock! Argh!

So. Bedtime for this little crafter. Goodnight and thanks for stopping by! :)

Octopode Alice

Remember the scrummy Octopode Factory Alice in Wonderland screen that I made for a screen swap and could barely bring myself to part with? ;)

Well, I've been at it again. :D Not a screen this time but a CJ entry. The journal I had to work on for the art journal CJ I'm taking part in had the theme of "Steampunk Alice". I immediately thought of the fab Octopode Factory images and lo and behold the CJ owner even put in her instructions that she liked the Octopode Factory Alice in Wonderland images. :) Perfect.

So I used similar techniques to the screen, using Dylusions sprays to make the background and to paint in the images (love the versatility of the digi images, that I can resize them to suit the project I am working on). This is the CJ page - and matching tag - that I made:

As it happens, this week's theme at the Octopode Factory Friday Challenge is "anything goes" so I am entering my CJ page and tag.

The CJ is going in the post today - it's got several more people to get around before returning to the owner but I hope, when she does get it back, she likes this page as much as I do! :)

P.S. Really must make *myself* one of these Octopode Alice projects... I always seem to have to keep giving them away! :lol:

Happy Birthday, Helen Ruth Davies

Today would have been my sister's 40th birthday.

I've found today really hard. When Helen was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 31, and we read that the survival statistics were that only 20% survived beyond 5 years, she was determined that she was going to be one of that 20%. When, after pre-op chemotherapy, full hysterectomy and oophorectomy and partial removal of the omentum, and post-op chemotherapy, the cancer came back after only a year, she realised that they weren't going to be able to cure this cancer and she was definitely going to die younger than she should. It was at that point that she told me that her goal was to make it to 40. She knew that the cancer was going to keep coming back and needing more treatment and that eventually the chemo etc would cease to be effective, but she never lost hope that if she could just keep going, in time a cure, or a more effective treatment, might be found.

It's been nearly 4 years since she died and I still miss her so much. I wanted to commemorate her birthday, the birthday that she so wanted to reach, so I took my daughters (who she never got to meet) for tea and cake to celebrate Helen's birthday. And I made a page in my art journal.

I've cried a lot of tears today, especially when writing the journalling on this page.

Happy Birthday, Helen. I miss you.

The Journey continues...

I'm still catching up with the weekly Art Journey prompts over at UKS. Well, I say catching up but I'm not really... cos it's taking me over a week to get a page done so I'm actually falling further behind on the weekly prompts, rather than catching up! :lol:

But nonetheless, I am being obsessively pedantic about wanting to complete the prompts in their proper order and not skip ahead etc so I am ploughing onwards. :) I'm actually really enjoying the process and the pages I am creating and am looking forward to having a journal full of amazing pages by the time this journey is finished.

So the latest page I have completed is for the Week 6 prompt which was all about building up layers to form your background:

I followed Vicki's tutorial fairly closely on this one and used Eco Green paints, Cosmic Shimmer Acrylic Drawing Ink, Derwent Inktense pencils, Tim Holtz tissue tape and white tissue paper to build up my background. The figure is from Tumblefish Studios.

Creativity

I am still slowly catching up on the weekly Art Journey prompts over at UKS... and may I just say that I am *loving* this journey and the art journal I am creating with it... it's looking fantastic and I am learning so much during this process. :)

I've made it as far as Week 5's doodling prompt, which I really enjoyed cos I used to doodle a LOT and it was great getting back into some creative drawing.

The detailed prompting for this week had me doodling a face with some flowers around it (I often tend to doodle faces) and it really got me thinking about creativity and the enjoyment of drawing and creating something from scratch and how freeing it is so that's where my page led me...

I wanted my page to be really vibrant and warm and flourishing, because that's how creativity feels to me. So I started off my doodling a big flower and added a striped border (filling in the white spaces with white pen). I then wrote my "title" wording around the flower:

I wanted more of a border and, following with the blossoming/growth theme, I doodled some leaves around the edges. And then it came to colouring. I decided to use my Promarkers for this page as I really wanted depth and vibrancy of colour. I've never actually used my Promarkers in my art journalling before but I love seeing Rosie's Promarker pages so I took some inspiration from her. :) I started by colouring in the flower in bright, warm shades of orange and yellow and the title in red:

I then coloured in the leaves, and the leafy border:

I wanted a warm coloured background too so I went with a slightly muted mustard shade of yellow:

To add to the warm, bright, vibrant feeling, I coloured in the edges with shades of red and blended it in a little with the blender pen:

And to finish, I added my journalling:

I'm really really pleased with how this page turned out. It's everything I want it to be and just looking at the big, beautiful flower and the warm, bright colours makes me feel happy and creative.. and I love that this page came entirely from me... all the images here are 100% created by me; there's no stamping, no clipped out images, no use of anyone else's images at all. And that's creativity. :)

UKS Art Journey - Week 4

I'm a bit behind on the prompts on the UKS Art Journey project but am determinedly working to catch-up.

This was my page for the week 4 prompt which was all about journalling, with researching involving clipping interesting words from magazines/printed material etc.

I kept this one fairly simple. I wiped Dylusions paints onto the page with a baby wipe and splatted with Dylusions inks to form the background and then doodled a border. I added wording clipped from magazines etc and a figure from a Tumblefish Studios download and then added journalling and doodling to finish. 

UKS Art Journey - Week 3

I'm a bit behind on the Art Journey journey because this page has taken me a while. I've been working on it for well over a week now. And, tbh, I'm still not entirely happy with it. But... oddly... I'm happy that I'm not happy with it, if that makes any sense? It's not an attractive page... but I rather feel it shouldn't be attractive because it deals with a part of my personality that is not attractive.

The prompt for week 3 was all about consumerism and this page is about the ugliness of my own personal consumerism gone mad:

Although you can't really see it beneath all the subsequent additions, this page began with a collaged layer of pictures of craft stash clipped from craft magazines. I scraped a thin layer of gesso over this collage and, using Kaisercraft alpha stamps, stamped the word "want" over and over in a border around the page using different colours of Distress Ink. I sketched a basic self-portrait of myself with my arms full of acquisitions and coloured it with watercolour pencils before cutting it out and gluing onto the page. I then added the journalling in layers radiating out from the figure and finished it off with a fringe of avaricious, grabby hands!

WOYWW - 1 February 2012

Seriously? It's February already? Gah. Seems like we only took the christmas tree down a few days ago... oh wait, we *did* only take it down a few days ago! :lol:

So he were are in February and another Wednesday is upon us, which of course means another tour of crafty desks the world over, as hosted by the lovely Julia over at the (now famous!!) Stamping Ground blog.

Not a huge amount to see on my desk today. I've spent Tuesday night (okay, tonight, given that it's only technically Wednesday because I'm once again up past midnight) crafting but have to say am not entitely happy with the results so far.

What I've been working on is an art journal background (definitely still needs work) and a (too rushed and not very good) self(-ish) portrait that I was planning to use on the journal page. I may scrap it and try something else.

I think I need to come back to these tomorrow with fresh eyes and see what I think of them in the cold light of day.

Think Pink!

I'm joining in with the new Art Journey project over at UKS and thought I'd share my first page with you.

The prompt/inspiration for this page was all about using colour for inspiration. I seem to be more and more attracted to the colour pink recently and, reading through the list of products/techniques for making backgrounds etc, I was reminded that I had a brand new paint dabber in a gorgeous shade of pink. It was fate! :) So I dug it out and used it to cover the entire page. I then mixed some of my Dylusions paints to get a nice paler shade of pink and used this colour to stamp around the edges using a piece of sequin waste (forgot to start taking pictures until I was part way through this stage! :lol:):

I then sponged white and then purple paints through a stencil to add butterflies in opposite corners:

Next up I wanted to make a big title for my page - the words Think Pink just seemed the perfect summation of what I wanted to say with this page. I used Tim Holtz masks for the letters and sponged black ink over and around them. I love the bold effect of the black against the pink background:

I then added my journalling. There's more I wanted to say here really (like how my Grandma was a devoted lover of pink and I suspect I may slowly be turning into her! :lol:) but I ran out of space!

To finish off, I felt like the page just needed something more to tie it all together, some kind of border. So I used Papermania butterfly stamps and black ink and doodled some lines between the butterflies to join it all together:

All in all, I'm really pleased with the results. It's quite a simple page but the colours make it bold and striking - and the "challenge", as it were, was all about colour so I think it meets the brief quite nicely. :)

WOYWW - 11 January 2012

I fear this poor little blog has been sorely neglected of late. Unfortunately, the reason for that is pretty much down to a severe lack of crafting over the past couple of months! The craft pit has been all but unusable after I started a full-on tidy-up/clear-out/reorganise way back in November but the process then got stalled by the events of December/January - not to mention me then being laid low by flu over the Christmas period!

However, I have deadlines looming (and the urge to craft is strong - it's the space to do so that's lacking!) so I've kicked my backside into gear and at least cleared enough space (just about!) on the desk to work in and have set to work.

Which means I actually have something on my desk to share with you on this windy Wednesday! :)

Gracing the preciously small space in the centre of all the clutter are some in-progress art journal backgrounds. I gesso'd and painted them last night and they are now awaiting further inking/spraying/painting/stamping and journalling. Which is hopefully going to happen tonight.

The big tidy is still going to happen - it HAS to, I've literally got a small path from the door to the chair and a small space on the desk and the rest of the room is disaster!! - but in the meantime I am at least crafting again. :)

Childhood Memories

Looking through childhood photos for a circle journal recently put me in a melancholy mood... so I decided to journal it:

The background is done with paint dabbers - I wasn't very happy with the result as it didn't blend well so I painted a layer of gesso over it to mute things and blend the overall look. I then stamped here and there all over the background with a text stamp and with some bubblewrap using London Fog Memento ink.

I overstamped a Tim Holtz clock face first in London Fog and then in Black Versafine here and there and then filled in around the edges of the page with a Tim Holtz flourish stamp and added some Tim Holtz flying birds here and there. The paper strips and flowers are hand-drawn and cut from a torn-out  dictionary page which I'd painted with gesso and I used the same paper to hand-write and cut out my journalling strips. The dancing children are an Indigo Blu stamp which I stamped onto white tissue paper and cut out.

Isn't this gorgeous?!

I just had a very busy - and extremely hot!! - but fun weekend in London at the Entertainment Media Show at Earl's Court where I had my photo taken with Arthur Darvill (Rory from Doctor Who), John Hurt, Joe Flanigan (Col. Sheppard in Stargate: Atlantis) and.... David Tennant!!... and got an autograph from Armin Shimmerman (Quark in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Principal Snyder in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I also spent a very enjoyable time chatting with two Marvel artists, John McCrea and Lee Bradley and watching them create some incredible drawings.

And I also bought this:

Isn't it just gorgeous? It's by a company called Phoenix Copper Art and he hand-makes these beautiful journals with burnished copper covers. He had loads for sale with all sorts of fabulous designs on the covers but you can also design your own cover and he will make it for you. They are also filled with good quality 200GSM paper - or you can choose to have it filled with lined paper if you prefer. They can also be refilled.

I think these are *fantastic* for art journals! I knew I had to have one but I was dithering for a long while between buying one of the designs he had ready for sale or getting him to do an original design cover for me. In the end I plumped for this one with the Stargate design cover but I think I will have to have a think about a cover design and perhaps order another one with an original design cover. :)

Oh wow!

I honestly could think of no more appropriate title for my most recent art journal page... cos "Oh wow!" is pretty much exactly how I am feeling about the topic of this page!! :D

I still can't believe it. I'm going to meet David Tennant! :D

I'm so excited about this that I just had to journal it. The background is a photo of a starry night sky that I printed onto copy paper and I printed the photo of David as the Doctor and cut it out and stuck it to the page and then just doodled and journalled all around it. :) I had a near disaster with the title when my silver pen decided to die part way through doing it! I got around the problem (the pen would splurge pools of silver ink if you pressed it down a few times but nothing would come out of the actual nib) by making pools of silver ink and dipping the pen nib in and then painting it onto the page! :lol:

A bit of journalling therapy...

Had a bit of a stressful afternoon yesterday with DD1's physio appointment. Due to a couple of factors, but mostly the hypermobility in her ankle joints, she is still not walking independently at 29 months. She is almost there... but she won't seem to take that final step (literally!) to walking without holding onto me. And any attempts to push or encourage her result in screaming tears and general upset. She was a nightmare at the appointment yesterday, cried nearly the whole time (for no reason whatsoever) and just wouldn't do anything... even things she normally happily does at home! It was so upsetting and stressful and it makes me worry so much, wondering how on earth we are ever going to get her walking properly.

So once the kids were in bed last night I decided to indulge in a bit of therapeutic journalling and dug out my too-long-neglected art journal. This was the result:

This started out as a simple plain background painted with Fresco paint. I jourrnalled and doodled all over it and coloured in the figures with a combination of fineliner pens and a bit of watercolour pencil.