A Bit of Art Journalling

As promised, I thought today that it was time I posted up some of the art journalling pages that I've created over the past few weeks.  I've been using prompts posted weekly by Ali Brandist on one of my Yahoo art groups (I'm playing about six months' catch-up!) and find them a really useful starting point for my pages.  So here are some that I've made - as you can see, they're mostly quite messy and collagey, quite different from my sister, Lindsay's, journal pages, which are far more artistic.

Ali used her pack of Angel Cards to select a message for each of us - this was mine, appropriately to do with new ideas and inspiration, something I was most definitely lacking in at the start of the year.  The background was distress inks over gesso, dabbed over with a scrunched up paper towel containing mopped up copper Krylon ink.  I'm a big Klimt fan so I couldn't resist using this image from one of his paintings for my angel, with the addition of a stamped wing.  (The hand is my own). 

For this page the prompt was "Word Inspiration" and I took mine from an old fiction book - both the cut out words and the written words.  I threw everything at this background - gesso, inks, blended oil pastels, stencilled punchinella, stamps, H2O paints, then collaged with a gyspy image, wings, butterflies and finished with Stickles and Beadazzles.

The next two pages are a double spread - "Silence Your Inner Critic/Develop an Inner Enthusiast" ..........

For the "critic" page I chose acrylic paints and inks for the background in dark brown colours, with a dictionary definition of criticism and stencilled cogwheels.  The Victorian lady reminded me of a very stern, bossy great aunt from my childhood and Queen Victoria provided another disapproving figure.  I used Dymotape for some of the words, handwrote others.

By contrast, I wanted my "enthusiast" page to be full of colour and liveliness, so I used a colour palette of orange, deep blue and purple for the background; lots of images of people dancing and leaping for joy, and again, a dictionary definition for "enthusiasm" and Dymotape, stamped and handwritten words.  I rubbed Distress Stickles over the harlequin stamp and other areas of the page.

All of these pages were great fun to create - the hardest part is always making the first marks on a page, but once you get going, you just don't know where you'll end up.

Well, that took me a lot longer to type than I expected.  I've been playing a game of Tag with Mia downstairs whilst I was brewing a cup of tea.  It's one of her favourite games, she creeps up behind me and tags me on the legs, then runs away, so I've been chasing her around the house as well - she loves it, it's kind of scarey and exciting for her, but safe too.  She likes to hunker down and leap out at me or run round the sides of a room, hunting me while my back's turned.  So when I came upstairs to use the computer, the game continued with paper ball throwing - over the bed, down the stairs, then behind the computer, under my chair ....... till she's tired herself out (or got bored) ....... and I can finally concentrate on finishing this post!