Monday 21 April 2014

Party Animal, week 15 of Journal 52

Hi all
As I'm trying to catch up on the Journal 52 I did a very quick page for last weeks prompt which was 'Party Animal'. I immediately thought of our daughter's two rabbits, one of whom is a bit cheeky so it suits him perfectly! I just drew a pencil sketch of him originally. Then I added a bit of colour as he has some ginger patches, and a hat and a blower to make him a Party Animal!
Below it the original sketch. For some reason I always like the sketch better, probably because it is easier to play with. Once you start adding colour you feel committed and can't change what you don't like as you can with paints or lead pencil!  Also below is the photo I took to use for the sketch, you can see his ginger colouring, especially under his chin!

Monday 7 April 2014

Rain or Shine Journal page

Had fun getting very messy with this page.
As usual all the vibrant colours are using Dylusions Sprays which I layered and masked off as I went. I then wrote the journaling with a Faber Castelle Pitt pen, stamped the water droplets with one of my fav stamps from Designs By Ryn. I then used water and a brush to lift off some of the colour from the water droplets, but as I'd heat set the inks they didn't lift off as much as I'd have liked. I highlighted the letters and water droplets with a white gel pen and went around the water droplets with a black Sakura Glaze pen. The pics of the Cormorants were cut from a National Geographic mag. I drew around them with the black Pitt pen to lift them from the background. and Voila!
Hope you like it, Suz xx

Wednesday 2 April 2014

Stars

Had great fun thowing this together between making birthday and Mothers day cards and pressies. Such a busy week. Anyway I used Dylusion Sprays, then used punched circles and sprayed with black sprays. Did some journaling in the circles with Sakura pens. Cut out an image of a woman and glued her onto one of the stars, gave her some wings with a white charcoal pencil. Then used that and a black charcoal to go round the stars & planets. I also stamped an image by Dyan Reavely which was a bit quirky and so lightened the mood. Coloured it in with pencils and voila! This really was a super fast page. Took longer to clean up than make! Suz xxx


Tuesday 11 February 2014

Abstract Fun

I tried abstract painting for the first time this week, the idea coming from Chelle Stein in her Journal 52 group, and loved it. I 'blobbed' paint onto paper and dragged it across with a credit card then took a step back and found images in it. How easy does that sound - well it wasn't for me!!! Think magic pictures years ago where you had to cross your eyes practically to see the image, well that was how this felt to me. To start with I couldn't see anything other than colour. I went away and came back, relaxed a bit and hey presto! I intended to make this a double page spread but they looked very different; the first page on the right was sharper, on the left hand page which I did second, the colours muddied a little so it took on a completely different look. So here they are. See if you can find the hidden pictures on the right hand page, there are six sets and I've added notes on the picture with the answers at the bottom!


Saturday 31 August 2013

My emotional journey


I'm a great believer in fate. I'd seen the Sketchbook Challenge for the month of August was Journeys  and it reminded me of the difficult emotional journey I'm going through at the moment and I was tempted to enter but sooo busy. Then while on a much needed 4 day break in Dartmouth with my hubby, I found a little folder which I thought would be ideal to keep my stamps in. It was a very old, fairly small, knitting binder with all sorts of very old fashioned patterns and basic knitting info. As I'm not a knitter (bout the only thing I don't do!) I had planned to give the insides away as I can't bear to throw crafty things away. However once home I looked at it again and it seemed just perfect to use as a base for an Art Journalling folder as the papers were of a card consistency and I liked the idea of upcycling the whole thing which cost £1.50 in a charity shop to begin a new creative life!

This is the first art journaling I've done since I attended the workshop by chance in July and only spurred on by the challenge. I'm calling it my emotional journey. I started it yesterday and finished this morning. I written very personal things and questions inside the tear shapes and around the question marks.

I started using by painting over the pages with white gesso. Then I used stencils of teardrops and question marks to paint through which I created on my Cricut Mini. Then I sprayed cosmic shimmer sprays through a background tear stencil which I placed over the other designs after masking them off. Once all was dry I did my journaling then went over the large tears with glossy accents to make them look wet. Very therapeutic, I'd highly recommend it - and thanks Sketchbook Challenge for inspiring me!
The front of my bargain binder

The two pages underneath my journalling


Suz
xxx