Travel journal video

I’ve made a video of all my art journal pages in my recently finished travel journal. This covers all the pages I made while traveling in Europe in 2018 and in 2019. I took with me some small tubes of acrylic paint, some images I printed before hand that i thought I may want to use and a few stencils. I made the decision NOT to print off any photos along the way as I wanted to avoid a scrapbook style of journal. Not that there is anything wrong with that but I have already made a couple of  travel journals like that.

So on these last 2 trips I searched for images along the way, in found magazines, airline magazines, museum and castle brochures, maps etc I made pages about whatever thoughts and emotions I had at the time, mostly (but not exclusively) in response to the places I visited. This was very satisfying and deeply enriched my travel experience. Hope you enjoy my little video!

Getting into Mandalas

Mandala JoyA JOY mandala.
Just finished this watercolour mandala last night. I’m not experienced with watercolours at all but I’m starting to like them a lot. I started this one using watercolour pencils but the bright red/orange is actually paint which I found to be much brighter than the pencils.
I am doing a 4 week Mandala course at the moment with Rosalind Gittings and for this exercise we thought of a positive feeling like Peace, Love, Joy etc and visualised a symbol for it to use in our mandala. So my symbol was a sunflower and the emotion was JOY.

I might go ahead and make some other mandalas for Love and Peace at some point.

Art journal pages that came easily

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!

I move onto canvas!

A couple of weeks ago I took a leap out of my comfort zone and went along to the Mixed Media class (with Turiya Bruce) where they (gulp) make art on canvas. I took along my art journal because I thought some of the pages I have done in there might translate reasonably well onto canvas. Turiya encouraged me to try an image transfer onto canvas, which I botched up, and I’m still wondering whether to continue with that one or just collage over it. But anyway, just seeing the kinds of things that people were doing inspired me and so I made this canvas during the week, using this photo of my mother in the 1930’s sometime. I just collaged down some papers for the background, including the Hymn “Abide with Me” which she loved, and also a remnant of her handwriting of her name and address before she was married. I painted over them all with a cream tinted gesso, and a bit of burnt umber around the edges. I sprayed some brown through an old plastic lace tablecloth (thanks for that Fran!). I sprayed the lace paper doilies with the same brown spray and stuck them down around the edges. I love this photo of my mother as it shows her vivacity and dramatic inclinations!

I have started a couple of other canvases also based on pages from my journal. It doesn’t seem like I will forsake my journal in favour of canvases though, I’m still loving my journal and dreaming up new ideas for it. Besides, if I start making lots of canvases, what am I going to do with them all? There’s limited wall space, and I can’t imagine anyone would actually buy one.

Blessings to all out there in blogland and cyberspace!