Creative Journey (lost along the way)

An internet buddy in the UK, Ali, invited me to play in her swap - 4 by 6 inch art journal pages.  We were to prepare the heavy cardboard pages with a background, and then we were given 10 prompts to embellish the page.

1 add some red, blue or gold to your backgrounds..any way you like

2 add either buttons, ribbon or lace

3 add some background stamping either text,a pattern or a flourish

4 Add a vintage image either , people, a child or a flower.

5 add some texture to your art, or an inchie or 3d embossing

6 add a postage stamp or a mini postcard, or tags

7 add metallic paper, a metal button or a metal charm

8 add a quote, a word or a number

9 add glitter, beads or gems

10 add a die cut or punched shape,fibers, or do some pen work i.e. doodles or journalling..

This is what I finally ended up with:

These are two of the seven pages I prepared - one to keep and 6 to swap.  They are all basically the same - each of the players will only get one.

I have to admit that I am hugely dissatisfied with these pages - I don't think they are at all attractive.  Maybe I didn't understand how to apply the prompts.  I trust you, my faithful readers - look at them and tell me how to fix this mess.  Keep in mind that everything is heavily glued with tacky glue to survive international posting.  I doubt that anything is going to come off easily.

Art journal weekend

I didn't do much creatively, except work more in my art journal. Here's a little update (click to see full size):




I'm having problemes with the lettering, but I'm working on it. I should have realized that this would be a problem, trying to get the words to appear clearly over busy backgrounds like these.

Art journal, continued

Teesha Moore specific instructions after completing the main collage work are to pack up all your pens and markers and go to a coffee house to do your pen work. I didn't exactly go to a coffee house, but I did visit a friends house to drink coffee, and she cross-stitched while I doodled away.

This journal is not going to be finished any time soon - I spent about four hours on it today, and although I was seriously working the whole time, I felt like O got very little done. Teesha's method is to work a little on each page, and then jump around to another page. It does help, because your feelings about a page change when you move away from it for a while. Here are a couple of pages, neither of which is near completion. The first shows a little pen work - I was really struggling to connect the cat to the ...um...person:



I don't have a cat on every page, but I do seem to have a lot of animals in this book. When I was doodling on this page, this little rhyme came into my head, so I wrote it down before it could escape:



I like how this is evolving. It started off being very random, but it feels like there is a theme emerging.

Art journal

I was discussing tutorials with my friend Cat - we were getting tired of doing Michelle Zindorf tutorials. I was already tired of Tim Holtz tutorials by the end of the twelve tags of Christmas. Who else has a style worth trying to copy (and is willing to teach it for free)? Wendy Vecchi? Ellen Hutson? Teesha Moore - yeah, I think I could learn a lot from Teesha Moore. She has a whole series of Youtube tutorials on how to do the things she does.

So, if you are wondering what I've been up to the past couple of days, I've been building an art journal. Teesha explains it very clearly, from cutting the paper and stitching together the signature, to applying paint to the paper, to ...everything. Friday I painted, yesterday, I applied borders, today I've been creating collage figures.

Here is a painted page with a border:



Here, I have the collage part mostly done:



I still have a few more pages to collage before I can start on the pencil and pen work. It's the pencil and pen work that really makes the journal. I know what I have right now is pretty weird, but it will get better/weirder before I'm done. I will let you know how I am progressing.