Category Archives: Art journal

Our European holiday begins!

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Finally the day had come! Our much planned and eagerly anticipated trip to Europe was beginning. Here we are looking excited at Brisbane airport. The trip from door to door took 33 hours! Fortunately it was uneventful in a ggod way, and we were delighted to find ourselves in Utrecht at 9am Wednesday morning 10th April.

The day was cold, about 7 degrees. Eirinn greeted us before he left for work. I was so happy to see him again after 16 months. Here we are out on his back deck.

After he left we checked out the closest cafe called KEEK which had very nice coffee and healthy, inexpensive food.

 

It was a wonderful feeling to be back in Holland, sitting in a cafe, watching all the people (mainly young, mainly students) ride past on their bicycles.

The weather was a bit colder than I anticipated, only 2 or 3 degrees most mornings, rising up to 9 or 10 maximum. My Katmandu  jacket turned out to be not very warm in these conditions! Luckily Rowena (Eirinn’s partner) had a coat I could borrow while I was there.

Eirinn and Row’s apartment is in a very desirable part of Utrecht, down the Oudegracht (near the old canal) surrounded by all the food shops they might need and only about 12 minutes walk into the main part of town. I fell in love with Utrecht even more this time (we visited 2 years ago). I particularly love the Dom, which is the tallest church tower in the Netherlands….you can see it here behind us.

After a few days in Utrecht I found time to make a page in my travel journal. I had prepared a few backgrounds beforehand including this one with gesso resist clouds, which I intended to use for a page about the journey over. And here it is, with a photo of us looking wasted after 33 hours travelling. It was a bit of a mission to find somewhere to print photos, I dont think its going to be as easy as I thought. I imagined there would be lots of printing places like the one at home in Brunswick Heads, where I can take a USB stick and get pics printed on normal (not photo) paper. But it seems I will have to use automated machines in Europe which only print 2 sizes and only glossy photo paper. O well, first world problems, as they say.

 

 

February and March Journaling

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Here are some recent art journal pages. I have neglected my blog in the last couple of months, perhaps because I’m not sure whether anyone actually looks at it. Maybe people are looking at it, but just not making comments. Anyway, I thought I’d better do a catch up post before we take off for Europe in a weeks time. (So excited!)

I arranged a song called “Something opens our wings” based on a poem by Rumi for our Sanctuary group, plus I had this painting of a dark angel from an old calendar, and the page just came together. I “channelled” a letter from my dark angels telling me that its OK to be depressed sometimes. I LOVE this page.

The beloved local newspaper in Byron bay is called the Echo, and after I did some undercollage using the Echo I decided to turn it into a page about how I love living in the Byron Shire. I love the map border on the left, and  I used the trusty old plastic lacey tablecloth as a stencil. I LOVE this page too!

One week in our art journaling class we were challenged to draw something directly into our journals. I drew my hand drawing and turned it into this page about creating yourself. Since the drawing was grey pencil I tried out just having a whole grey scale page for a change and I like it.

 

For this next page our assignment was to cut 2 different landscapey pictures into interesting geometric shapes and fit them together. Since I have travel on my mind this is what I came up with.

And to finish this post here are 2 backgrounds which I have begun to collage and now I don’t know what to do next. This first one I think is so beautiful I’m afraid to do anything else to it.. The second one I think I’m liking the way its going,….but I’m not sure where that is exactly.

 

The background is quite textured ( I gessoed through the plastic tablecloth, let it dry, then painted over it with watery cobalt blue and raw umber) I shall be interested to see what appears on the left hand side.

I’ve been busy preparing some painted backgrounds in the journal I will be taking with me to Europe. I’m not planning on taking my acrylic paints, just a small watercolour travel set. I’m totally inexperienced with watercolour, so….it will be interesting!

Behind the Masks

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I was inspired by a prompt video by Christy Sobolewski to make this page using only one stamp in many different ways. I made the stamp from scratch by cutting out diamond shapes from some craft foam and gluing it (just using Golden Matt medium) onto a wooden block. This page is quite textured as one of the techniques involved spreading light molding paste on part of the page and pressing into it with the stamp. I collaged the joker/harlequin card because it seemed to go with the patterns on the page, and then I decided it was a page about Who am I behind all the masks of the ego. This was quite a different page from others I have done, for a start I’d never used molding paste before. It was a bit challenging collaging over such a textured background!

Art journal pages that came easily

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It’s getting towards the end of January, I have a brand new art journal ( I bought the bound Strathmore one) and I have quite a few pages from my finished journal that I still haven’t posted about…so here they are! I’ll spread them over 2 posts. This is one I started in Zom’s class.We were meant to use a photocopy of some part of our body but I’ve recently fallen in love with some scrapbook papers so I decided to cut my hand out of one of those. I wrote about being left handed, whether or not that makes me “artistic” and I added some pics of some famous left handed artists. I love this page, esp the silhouettes of my hand in the background, created with gesso resist.

This next page was mostly done in class also. People had brought in tarot and other divination cards and we chose 2 of them for our writing prompt. “Knowledge” was one of the cards I pulled and  I ended up writing about what I would like to read over the next few months. I had a bunch of images that I carry to class, including this beautiful painting of the reading woman. She seemed to want to be on the page with the ancient writing and statues so I just tied them all together with some burnt umber and yellow ochre paint. The whole page came together really fast and was very meaningful to me…I love it when that happens! I added the bird when I got home and then the sentence “through the doorway of knowledge flies the bird of wisdom” just popped into my head and became the title of the page.

Here is a page about our coming trip to Europe and how excited I am about it. I had lots of fun experimenting with writing in many different fonts..I’m a bit of a font lover, I think it dates back to my childhood days. When I was 10 I was sent to the opportunity school in Summer Hill and we had to buy the Speedball book of writing. We were expected to copy fancy fonts for heading on all our work and I loved it, especially the “old english” font. It’s much easier now to find interesting fonts, I’m always downloading them from free font sites on the net.

Love and light to all of you!

A Box of Darkness

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“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to realise that this too was a gift.”  Mary Oliver

This is one of my favourite pages from my art journal so far. I started with the black background and the picture of Saturn. I’ve always been drawn to images of Saturn.  I am a Capricorn, so Saturn is my ruling planet although I don’t think that is why I love the way it looks. It always seems so majestic, hanging there with those gorgeous rings around it. I had the idea a while ago to make a negative of a photo of myself and write about how I sometimes just feel negative. But I’m a bit tired of photos of myself, so I used this Goddess statue instead. I am always attracted to classical statues whenever I see them on journal pages or mixed media artworks. So, I LOVE the Saturn and I LOVE the statue and I LOVE all the bits and pieces I used to make the border. These include: an antique zodiac, antique pics of sun and moon, some text about what it means to have moon conjunct Saturn (which I do), and a chant that I wrote  for a ritual once about going into the darkness and giving birth to yourself. The entire border was black and white until I had the idea to paint it with Nickel Azo Gold which gives everything a yellowed antiquey look. LOVE!

So anyway, perhaps it is because I am a Capricorn (I’m actually an agnostic about astrology!) or not, but I do get negative and depressed sometimes. I wish I didn’t of course, but I also know that depression has it’s gifts. For one thing, if we were happy all the time we wouldn’t even know we were happy because we would have nothing with which to compare it. The “box of darkness” refers to the Mary Oliver quote above and I’ve also used it as a way of acknowledging the gifts that depression can bring.

Travel Journal continues into Switzerland

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It’s summer holidays here, and I’ve been spending some time working in my travel journal. So far, since my last post about this journal here I’ve finished the pages covering our journey to Saverne and Strasbourg in France and on into Switzerland.

 

Some pamphlets we picked up are stored in a pocket made from a postcard from the Bosch museum.

I employed the Azza technique again here on the right page, cutting up 3 photos to make a gothic window shape I used a bit of walnut ink around the edges of the page to give an aged effect. Love that walnut ink!!

We were lucky enough to catch this wonderful English choir in an old church near Saverne. They were certainly the best choir we heard on the whole trip…the English really know how to do choirs!

 

We drove from Saverne in France to Romanshorn on Lake Constance in Switzerland in one day. On the way we diverted up a mountain to see the Chateau of Haut-Koenigsbourg.I made this background using a new stencil by Michelle Ward that my darling husband gave me fro Christmas. First I painted 2 pages with yellow ochre blending into cobalt blue, then used blue, green and yellow spray inks through the stencil. Then I ripped some fleur de lis scrapbook paper to make a border. I loved the effect of the ripped patterned border so much I used it again on a few more pages. On the left page I used a photo I took to make a pocket to hold a pamphlet from the castle. This is my favourite page so far from this journal, I LOVE everything about it.

A double page devoted to Strasbourg, where we explored the cathedral and took a boat tour. As you can see I used another fleur de lis scrapbook paper here. I visited a few scrapbook stores in my area and bought every medieval/baroque style paper I could find.

 

I painted the next 2 pages with yellow ochre and red oxide, and printed out a map from google maps of our itinerary from Saverne to Romanshorn. There’s a pic of the city of Konstanz in the centre which flips over separately.

Here it is again with the central photo flipped over. Now you can see the old door (from 1322!) and the library of St Gallen, which has many beautiful OLD manuscripts and books.

 

 

 

We drove over and through the Alps to the Italian part of Switzerland and stayed in Bellinzona which was gorgeous. I had forgotten to print out any photos from this part of the trip, so I put together a montage of 3 photos on the left page, the 2 in the background I made pale.  I used a pale green damask patterned paper for the background on the right and tore a border with it on the left. That walnut ink came in handy again around the edges.

Over and through the Alps again to Grindelwald, a beautiful valley surrounded by snow capped peaks. The left page is a map I picked up in Grindelwald  and the right page another Azza style of cut photos. I had yet another fleur de lis patterned paper that I used to make a border and tie the 2 pages together. There is some of Gerrit’s writing (in Dutch) about Grindelwald on the left page.  I have not really written a great deal in this travel journal, just a few lines here and there. Partly because it all happened over a year ago now and partly because I have so many photos I want to use. When I travel again this year I expect to write a lot more, as I intend to be making the journal as I am traveling.

I still have all of our 4 week trip through France to go in this journal! I don’t know whether I’ll get it all done or not..in any case I quite like what I’ve done here so far. Thanks for listening, blessings to you all in blogland.

 

My year in Pictures July to September

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My year in pictures continued: JULY

My walking companion on many an afternoon this autumn/winter and spring has been Astaria, who as you can see likes to dress unconventionally on our walks. We usually walk about 4 or 4.30pm in the wintertime, taking in some of the taxing hills of Ocean Shores and working up an appetitie for dinner!

A winter wedding at The Fig Tree in Byron Bay. The bride is the lovely daughter of a friend who sang in one of my choirs.

 

 

African LEAF is a charity that supports some orphans in Kenya. We had a trivia night as a fundraiser (and made 2 and a half thousand!)and I made up all the questions for the night. I also was a marker, along with my besties Rachel and Jana. It takes me about a month to make up all the questions and I get obsessed and don’t think about much else during that time!There’s quite an art to making up questions that are interesting and fun.

AUGUST  Our wedding anniversary is August 1st so we always go out to dinner. This time we went to Muoi’s Feast in Byron.

 

 

We had another non-simultaneous house swap with some people from Ireland for a week. We are going to stay in their holiday house in Dingle next July. So we had to clear out of our house and headed North to Rainbow Beach, north of Noosa for a few nights. There are beautiful cliffs of coloured sands there and it was noticeably warmer. We even had a swim.

Meeting some more BFF’s for lunch at The Yum Yum Tree cafe in New Brighton, in this case, Ruth and my sister Kathryn. Yum!

 

 

The Songbirds put on a clothes Swishing party (to swap clothes) to raise some money towards our CD. We had a really fun time, although not many people came so we didn’t make any money!

 

 

I decided to go along to a Mixed Media class with Turiya Bruce (pictured here) who is an excellent teacher with lots of great ideas. I still feel insecure about doing art work on a canvas but I started a few pieces with her. She won’t be teaching in this area for a while now, but I hope I finish the pieces I’ve started.

We bought a 2 seater kayak a while ago but haven’t used it much. This particular Sunday we agreed to go out on the Brunswick river with our friends Susan and John (instead of going to Sanctuary) and we had a glorious couple of hours rowing up the river.

 

Another couple I married down at Broken Head. I had known the bride for years, taught her and her sister at school and they both babysat my children, so it was really special to do her wedding.

The dark places

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I finally put something on this background that has been sitting here for months. I blogged about how I made the background here. For a long time I thought maybe I would do something about fire, since it looks a bit like flames. My sister commented that she thought it looked like a page about fear, but I didn’t feel to write a page about all my fears. I thought I’d rather write about what helps me to navigate my fears. Not just my fears, but the dark places of anxiety and depression as well. So I found some kind looking eyes and stuck them into the blackness. The goddess with the gold dust is showing me that there is treasure to be found by going through the darkness, and the eyes are showing me that I am not alone, they are there to help. I’m not sure who “they” are, something like spirit guides, or guardian angels, or aspects of my higher self. And maybe they’re all the same. In any case they are serene, unafraid, and they give me the gifts of compassion (for others going through dark places), courage and resilience.

I have been working in my journal a lot in the last few weeks, wanting to get all the pages finished for our exhibition (and they are finished, yahoo!) so I have a backlog of pages I would like to blog about. So I intend to try to blog a bit more frequently for a while to get through them all.

We’ve booked out tickets for Europe next year, nearly 4 months, wow! I’m still looking into what kind of journal I might keep while I’m traveling, there’s so many different options!

Growing Older

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A few weeks ago I had a week when a few different people commented that I looked unhappy lately. This perplexed me because actually I don’t think I’ve ever been happier really! So I figured out it’s because the corners of my mouth are succumbing to gravity, so if you catch sight of me not smiling I probably do look unhappy, or even grumpy! This is of course a rather disturbing new development in my aging process, but not one I can do much about, unless I have a facelift which I won’t.I have noticed that not everyone gets this dropping mouth thing, I guess its hereditary because it happened to my mother. I wish it wasn’t happening. Sometimes I feel a bit depressed when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in the mirror or not smiling in photos. On the other hand, some people my age are much more wrinkled than I am, so I suppose we all have different aging processes. I’m trying not to think about it, I mean I’m healthy and happy, and glad to be alive and able to go through the aging process! I think it was Maurice Chevalier who said “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative”.

So I made a page about all this and here it is. It is a fairly simple page really. I used some stencils and stamps and the red flowers are from some old wrapping paper.

I’ve nearly completed my first art journal..I started it in September last year, so its taken me 15 months. I have been working in a couple of other journals as well, but this is my large A4 one and I’m feeling quite proud of it. We have an art journal “exhibition” on next Thursday when some of the brave souls from our art journaling class (including me) will be putting them on display. It’s a bit scarey! I’ll take some photos and let you know how it all goes. I’ll be smiling in the photos.

Recent pages in my A5 journal

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I seem to be using my A5 size journal as my more experimental one these days, where I try out things at my art journal class with Zom. This is the page I did last week….our prompt was simply to write about our favourite number! Not something I’d thought about much, but it only took me a few seconds to realise it was 8, I’ve always liked it, probably because its in   my birth date, 18th. It also makes me think of a crimson colour, not sure why. Anyway, no doubt  this is all fascinating to you but I really want to tell you about this page because I’m proud of it.

The process: used Zom’s idea of cutting out a stencil of the number and gessoing around it. Then painted the page with red and wiped much of it off. The paint takes to the ungessoed parts of the page very differently, so the eights really stand out. Painted a watery purple over the whole page and wiped it back. Then I used the negative part of the stencil I had cut to make some white eights. I had also painted some red and purple on a spare sheet of paper, then used a stencil and dylusions spray inks on this. I scanned the result and reduced it in size, printed it out and cut the large decorated eight from it.  Then I cut borders from the original piece of stencilled paper. Somehow it became necessary for me to be on the page “presenting” my friend,  the large eight. I would never have thought of devoting a whole page to a number, but I’m pleased with what I did here and the harmony of the colours and patterns.

Here is another recent page in my small journal. The inspiration for this page was the black and white photo of the Indian woman who seemed to be looking so meaningfully at me. This is a page about the sort of older wise woman or crone that I would like to be. For the heading I printed the words out on the laser printer and made a transfer onto clear sticky tape.The angel is from some old wrapping paper.

I seem to use a lot of angels in my art journal! I started this page in class, we had to use a credit card to apply paint in some way. I swooped some gold paint on this blue background and they reminded me of angel wings. Also it just happened that I had put this poem by Hafiz up on the fridge that week, to remind me that I probably still could have many gifts and talents that I haven’t even discovered or used yet…I love that idea! I cut the gold border to echo the triangular shapes in the backgound. The angel has one wing which comes out from the page 3 dimensionally, but you can’t really see that from this photo. Here is the entire Hafiz poem:

There are so many gifts
Still unopened from your birthday,
There are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to you by God.
The Beloved does not mind repeating,
“Everything I have is also yours.”
Please forgive Hafiz and the Friend
If we break into a sweet laughter
When your heart complains of being thirsty
When ages ago
Every cell in your soul
Capsized forever
Into this infinite golden sea.
Indeed,
A lover’s pain is like holding one’s breath
Too long
In the middle of a vital performance,
In the middle of one of Creation’s favorite
Songs.
Indeed, a lover’s pain is this sleeping,
This sleeping,
When God just rolled over and gave you
Such a big good-morning kiss!
There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday.
O, there are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to your life
From God.

~ Hafiz ~