Mellow Fruitfulness

Changing Seasons was the prompt this week for Joggles Art Journal Adventures. It was very appropriate as we have had some beautiful autumn days filled with sunshine and golden leaves. They were too good to spend indoors and dog walking and photography was how I filled those days as you can see from the past few blog posts. Sadly the weather has now taken a turn for the worse with rain and wind, but I enjoy even those days (although the dog does not!).  There was plenty of inspiration for the prompt and I used as my focal points two photographs of autumnal leaves and trees.

For the background I brayered on autumn colours and then added stencilling with S090 Leaves 6 Stencil from Stencilgirl Products. I also added more leaves by rubber stamping with a give-away stamp that came with a magazine many moons ago. After gluing on the main images I added more stencilling with Gold Embossing Paste through stencil S277 Pressed Leaves stencil.  I then glued on the autumn part of the calendar (from The Simple Things magazine) and sprayed the pages with a gold mica spray. Finally I outlined with black and white markers as shown.

 The title was stamped onto vintage paper with a mix of alphabet stamp sets. It comes from John Keats's poem To Autumn (1820).

Decisions

I'm far behind in posting finished art on this blog and I will try and catch up this week. This spread in the 8 x 8" Dylusions art journal was done for the last week of our September theme on The Documented Life Project 2016 that was: Roll Call - Being Accountable. The art challenge was to add stripes. The spread itself was completed not this weekend just passed but the weekend before that. As you can tell I went a wee bit mad with the stripes.

 I  used two quotations on the page. They read: "Without personal accountability we cannot grow nor can we ever improve ourselves", and the other one says: "You are not a product of your circumstances. You are a product of your decisions". 

Materials: acrylic paint, deli paper (previously printed on a gelli plate), collage with tissue paper, photographs and a self-portrait printed from my Instagram account by Social Print Studio, as well as a striped postcard from Paperchase, washi tape and a postage stamp..

Tools: stencils from Stencilgirl Products: L439 Stripes and L435 Ancient Marks (on the deli paper)

A Journey into Yourself

Colour Me Positive's prompt this week was: Journey, and the art challenge to add a place on your page that you would like to  go to on a journey. Well, never mind the fact I was there back in April, I would very much love to return to New York so this is another journal spread dedicated to our trip there.

It was good that I had so many New York related art supplies to play with, as well as many, many photographs. I started with Stencilgirl's L443 City Buildings stencil and played with it both by removing paint through it and adding paint in the traditional stencilling method. I wanted the pages (in my A4 Dylusions journal) to look both grungy and graffiti like.

Once I was happy with the spread I added collage with deli paper previously stencilled with black. I grabbed another great New York related art supply, this time the Urban Scribble foam stamp, cling rubber and stencil set, designed by Nathalie Kalbach and added the rubber stamp image along the bottom of the pages.

I had found a quotation I liked and that related to the theme of Journey. It reads: "To travel is to take a journey into yourself" (Danny Kaye) and added it to the page using collage with magazine words as well as by rubber stamping some of them on.

The next step was to add on the images which are all my own photographs printed sized 2 x 2" by the Social Print Studio. On the right hand page I used pictures from Times Square while the yellow taxis feature on the left. The pictures were distressed using a Prima tool and scratching over them to stay with the grungy look.

Finally I added bits of New York themed washi tapes as well as a postage stamp with the Statue of Liberty on it. Together the pages are another great reminder of our visit.

The Light at the end of the Tunnel

The new theme for March on The Documented Life Project 2016 is: Seeking Treasure - finding value in the small things. For some reason my brain stored that as: tiny treasures. The art challenge for this week was: go splatter crazy.

I started without any preconceptions by making a background with acrylic paints and a stencil. It's very hard to spot the stencil any more but I used Floral 1 stencil by Traci Bautista. I splattered on the pages to my heart's content.

I then started to think about my wrongly remembered prompt of tiny treasures and grabbed the little stickers, printed from my Instagram photographs by Social Print Studio and thought about making a path with them as the cobblestones.

A path has to lead somewhere and I knew I had this small image of the light at the end of the tunnel which seemed a perfect fit. I also found a wanderer for the path. After I stuck on the images (they are self-adhesive) I outlined the path with a black Stabilo All pencil and outlined each one with a white marker.

I wrote a variety of quotations along the side of the path, all to do with that light at the end of the tunnel. Then I went slightly mad and added the tiny little footprints along the path. I must have been a bit delirious already to attempt such madness as shortly afterwards I started to feel quite unwell, thought I would go for a short lie-down and woke up 25 hours later. I have no idea what hit me but presumably I needed that sleep. All back to normal now!

In hindsight perhaps the spread is symbolic for that journey I took through sleep into the light of this new day now. For me the 9th of March 2016 simply vanished into nothingness.

I love the higgledy-piggledy look of the path and also the fact that the little photographs are now safely stored in my art journal to look at in the future. As for all my DLP16 spreads, this one has been done in the 8 x 8" Dylusions art journal.

Letting the Light In

This is the next spread in my gigantic ledger. You can read about it in an earlier post. It's so large that I have to stand up to work in it and I find I do enjoy that. These pages are part of the Novel Approach online class by Tammy Garcia so I won't be talking about how I made it much here.

I loved collaging on all the different images. Some come from magazines and calendars, others are my own Instagram pictures printed by Social Print Studio, and of course I couldn't resist adding some postage stamps. Other images are from my gelli plate printed papers and there are also vintage images on the page.

We were meant to use stick-on letters and then remove them but they haven't arrived yet so instead I used a letter stencil to add my song text. It's part of my favourite Leonard Cohen song Anthem. You can read the lyrics and listen to the song here.