Out of the frying pan...

Couldn't resist calling my page this, it's done (or at least as done as I want it to be for now) so here are some pics of it. Apologies for the pics in advance, since getting my new laptop running 64-bit Windows 7, I've discovered that my photo-editing software MGI PhotoSuite, and my graphics package Windows Draw are both far too old to be able to run on this operating system - so I am playing around with what I have got and trying to download new software which *is* supported and *will* run under 64-bit Windows 7... so far MS Publisher seems to be kinda doing what I want it to do, but it's just not the same as the software I've been using since forever grrr...

Out of the frying pan... and into the fire, the journaling reads. Because that's kinda how I feel, having jumped straight into this without really knowing what I am doing. But then this is a journey of discovery, and the whole point of the exercise is to try out new things and not be scared by them.

Hopefully I'll look back on this page in a few months/years time and think "Girl what on EARTH were you doing!" but for now I'm actually kinda happy with this page.

And like it says: Who will judge? Only me...

THERE ARE NO

ART-JOURNALING POLICE!

And that lovely phrase came from my days on the newsgroup rec.crafts.textiles.quilting, only there it was there are no quilt police, but it means exactly the same thing - if YOU like what YOU have done then you have succeeded - nobody else matters, this is YOUR artwork and YOUR journey. After all, this is a journal, and the definition in Merriam-Webster's dictionary says: "Journal - a record of experiences, ideas, or reflections kept regularly for private use".


So I will continue to throw ink and paint and rubber-stamps at my pages, and make a complete mess everywhere ('altered' armchair anyone? that blue overspray effect could really catch on...) and I will enjoy myself as I do it.

Thought I'd better stick a couple of pics of what I'd written cos it's a bit hard to read on the main pic, these are certainly preconceptions in my world and I have to learn how to live with them. Or more to the point, learn how to get around them. Nobody said this was going to be an easy ride!

My Art Journey

So whilst I'm getting all creative and throwing paint around and spraying colourwash everywhere, it does of course occur to me that I don't really have a clear idea of what I'm doing (or why lol)... but I've found an online forum which will have a section dedicated to Art Journalling... Each week there's going to be a "Research" prompt followed by an "Action" prompt, all cunningly presented in a handy PDF format. The first week covered making your own journals, couple of great ideas there, but I already have an A5 book I want to use, so have skipped that (altho thats not to say I won't have a go another time!)

This week was all about preconceptions and colour, including a great article by Claire Vickery from Creative Moments (who has just about convinced me to throw out my Hobbycraft acrylic paints and sell my soul for a set of Claudine Hellmuth acrylic paints instead...) all about the different types of mediums we can use in our art journals; acrylic paints, watercolour paints, colour mists/sprays, pan pastels, inkpads, crackle paint and distress stains, watercolour pencils and crayons, oil pastels - goodness me is there anything we can't use?

So today, whilst waiting on my calendar pages to dry, I dug my A5 journal out and sat and thought for a while. Some of my preconceptions are "am I ready for this?" and "can I do this?" so whilst having fun spraying my colourwash inks in shades of blue I was thinking about the other colours, and wanted a go with the red and orange sprays... so a firey page somehow sprung into life... I think the journaling will be "out of the frying pan into the fire" or something like that...

I've used Red Pepper, Sunset Orange and Butterscotch sprays on this, tilting the page to let it run down (or up) so it looks like a burning fire. It's hard to take a good picture of with flash, 'cos as well as colourwash sprays I had a go with Perfect Pearls Heirloom Gold as well, and it reflects the flash really well lol... around the edge I've stamped a couple of Dylusions stamps, coloured one with a white Posca pen and stamped the other using Barn Door Distress Ink... so this is now drying before I go wild and start writing on it!

Art Journaling (or getting well messy...)

Saturday I should have gone to an all day crop, was especially looking forward to it as it was finishing at 7pm rather than 5, so an extra couple of hours to work, but when I woke up I had very little voice and couldn't stop sneezing - who gets ill on the weekend? There should be a law against it!

So I've spent the weekend slouched in front of the laptop playing online backgammon, and watching crafting videos and the Kate Crane DVD's I got for Christmas, and eventually plucked up the strength to have a play over on my craft table... I had already made a start on my art journal calendar a few weeks back but hadn't got very far with it, just gesso'd the pages and then put a base coat of blue and white acrylic paint on them. So far so good. I'm using cheapo Hobbycraft acrylic paints 'cos at £2.59 in their sale they were just too good to resist. They are a little thick to spread, but as I'm no expert I'm happy to play around with them for now.

So yesterday I decided to go a bit mad. NO change there, I hear you say... well I dug out my Adirondack Colourwash sprays and slapped on my latex gloves and got busy... all 3 shades of blue... even had a go at spraying thru an alphabet stencil.... and shock horror, I didn't like it... it was far too dark. So I left it to dry whilst I made yet another cup of tea and played some more online backgammon.

When I came back to have another look, I decided everything needed lightening up, so grabbed a bottle of pearlescent acrylic paint in a very pale blue, and covered the whole of both pages, using an old creditcard (sacrilege!) to spread the paint very thin. You can still see the stencilling thru it, but now its all a pale pearlescent blue.

Still not that keen, so it was back out with the colourwash sprays and a few very light applications of each of the blues, and I'm happy. For now. Stuck it to one side to play with something else. Tomorrow is another day - I'm thinking stamping with distress inks and Stazon, making little marks in acrylic paint with bottle tops and that creditcard, mebbe even some bubblewrap (hang on, I've got a clear stamp of bubblewrap - that'll do...)

Welcome to 2012!

OK, so I kinda drifted off again at the end of 2011, but hey whats new... I'll have a good sort out of pics to upload over the weekend whilst I'm trying to finish my current project and make a start on my art journal calendar pages for January. Yup, I'm moving into art journalling, it looks a whole bunch of fun and as my fella bought me Kate Crane's DVD's for Christmas I'm all inspired to get paints inks and sprays out and get all messy!

So for 2012 I'm going to hold back on the monthly swaps and instead concentrate on working on things for me - I have loads of scrapbook pages I want to do, lots of projects I want to have a go at and lots of craft-related sorting out and tidying up to achieve - this year I *will* sort my clear stamps out into some sort of order, mainly because I can't get any more packs into the box and they are in danger of getting seriously squished!

More tip-in pages

Fortified by supper and a cuppa, here's some more tip-in pages... these ones are for DragonflyJane, each one has 2 pics cos they both open up...

The first two are for her 'Corvids' theme, so I chose the poem 'The Raven' by Edgar Allen Poe...pages nicely distressed to look as if they'd been around since the poem was written lol...

These next two are for her 'Graveyards/Cemetries' theme - she posted that she had a warped sense of humour so I hope she appreciates the 'D.I.Y. Skeleton kit contained within the coffin...



Mistyrat - Victorian Vintage Fashion

Leanie - Words to live by




Roxy52 - Garden Inspirations



NettyB - Butterflies



Jolene - Vintage fashion/Home sewing

Loved doing this one in particular - that's a real sheet of iron-on embroidery patterns from a book dated back to October 1935... hope this is 'vintage' enough lol... 

Now all I have to do is to re-do my 2nd page - the glossy accents was a bad move and the page is beyond repair, so I think it's back to the drawing board...

Then I can move onto my current Circle Journal pages, and ONLY WHEN THEY ARE DONE THEN can I start on the Halloween Home Decoration swap - and I sooo want to start playing with that RIGHT NOW!

Tip-In pages

..."what's a tip-in page?" I hear you ask... well it's a piece of artwork that you create which gets inserted between the pages of a book, kinda an Altered Art thing, and yes it's another online swap, it sounded rather intriguing so I signed up for it... Everyone in the group has their own individual theme, each page to be 7" by 5" in portrait style so will drop perfectly into a book, and not too lumpy/bumpy...

3 months down the line and several bottles of hair dye later I finally got 11 pages off in the post to the hostess this morning.. I'd put my name down for 2 groups of 6, so had to do 12 pages, but the second page for myself just wasn't playing ball so I wasn't able to post it. But everyone else's are done - and here's the pics to prove it lol...



Me - Alice in Wonderland



Nicci24lego - Peter Pan





jainethepain - Positive Thinking





Voodoo Vixen - Shakespears Plays
(I did Romeo and Juliet)

That's the first 4... 

Back again...

I know, I know, MIA again... but I'm still here, crafting away, lots of lovely creations to show you! So take a deep breath and have a cuppa, I think you might need it...

June's tag swap was for the birthstone of alexandrite or pearl, I chose alexandrite as apparently its a purpley colour, and I like purple... also being Gemini we had to have two of something and have a crown somewhere on the tag, so I made 2 little punched tags and embossed a crown onto them and hung them with some ballchain from the top of the main tag.

The background music staves are embossed in purple embossing powder and between them (not showing very clearly) is a row of flowers done in pearlescent embossing powder. The ribbon was coloured using Dusty Concord distress stain, a technique I picked up from a fabby Distress Inks class I took in June with the lovely Jennie Boxall (The Artistic Stamper) - I get the feeling I'll be doing a lot of colouring ribbon seeing as I bought 10 yards of plain white seam-binding (as well as several other 'essential' crafting items...)

Julys Birthstone Ruby so lots of luscious red was called for in this months tag. July 4th is Independence Day - stars and/or stripes, and July 14th is Bastille Day so something French (a word, image... anything loosely French)

So... we have the tag coloured with Fired Brick Distress Stain, stripes embossed with a Cuttlebug folder and the stars are brads.

The Eiffel Tower was stamped using black Archival ink onto linen-look paper which I'd firstly coloured with Shabby Shutters and Tumbled Glass Distress Inks, then torn roughtly around the edge to leave a fluffy white border. A few well-chosen stamps which were French-themed and lastly the tag was adorned with thin red/white/blue ribbons (which didn't make it into the photo but trust me they are there...)

August tag was hard work 'cos as usual I tried to be clever and almost didn't get them done, however I persevered and here is my offering... our hostess said: "The birthstone for August is Peridot, so using that colour in bling or other materials is essential! And with the predominant starsign being fiery Leo and the summer being upon us, something shiny and metal is a must too ...

Finally, I'd love you to please draw your inspiration from the Wizard of Oz - whether this be literally, abstractly, or even just picking a quote or song line, as long as there's at least a tentative link back to it (for example, THOSE red shoes, lollipop guild, yellow brick road, straw, bluebirds, rainbow, monkey, poppies, Toto, hot air balloons...)"

Well, peridot is a mid-green colour, my tags have come out a little dark but have lots of gold embossing to help 'bling' them up. As for the shiny and metal, I used alcohol inks on two die-cut hearts to try and re-create the look of metal, before covering them with glossy accents which immediately changed how they looked... The quote is from The Wizard of Oz, I thought it went well with the 'metallic' hearts... the quote is reverse-printed in black onto acetate and immediately covered in gold embossing powder and heat-set, so you get a black image with a tinge of gold around its edges.

Last tag this time around is a separate swap I joined, with an Alice in Wonderland theme... and again I almost got caught out as I didn't read the instructions properly and only initially made 6 tags instead of the 8 I should have done... .oops...

Sooo - Alice in Wonderland... brain kicked well and truly in for this one, I wanted to portray Alice falling down the rabbit hole, namely because of the fab set of stamps I'd got fom The Artistic Stamper showing just that... trouble is I didn't think there was quite enough room on a 6" x 3.5" tag to really do it justice, so came up with a fiendish plan, which by the time I'd got it onto the cardstock was actually working quite well!

We start off with The White Rabbit at the bottom of the rabbit hole, checking his watch, he's clearly underground because the edge of the tag is shaded in shades of brown distress ink... and above his head are some branches (Tim Holtz 'On The Edge' branches die on a green speckled background.)

Cunningly tucked under the branches is the second half of the tag which folds down to reveal the length of the rabbit hole - clever eh...

The base cardstock is cream, I've used Antique Linen, Tea Dye, Vintage Photo and Black Soot Distress Inks in decreasing amounts along each side of the tag to create the rabbit hole, leaving a paler centre from which the images should 'pop out'... I don't think there's usually much light when you fall down a rabbit hole to really be able to see too much tho...

As well as the 'Alice' image, the set also has the 'cupboard' image which I stamped directly onto the background. I also created a picture and a map using stamps from my drawer (the map is part of Pink Paislee's 'Daily Junque' clear stamps set, the country scene is Personal Impressions, the frames are Stampourri) and these along with Alice herself were stamped onto white cardstock and coloured with ProMarkers (of which I now have a much larger collection of colours to choose from...)

So thats the last 3 months of tags caught up with - next stop are my Tip-In pages... but I need a cup of tea myself first...