I’ve decided to get back to my blog, now it’s 2016! Here are a few pages from my third journal which is almost finished. 
I mostly love my pages actually. This is what I use: Acrylic paints, stencils (home made and bought, including a plastic lace tablecloth), collage, scrapbook patterned papers, home made foam background stamps, gesso resist, occasionally a spray ink. And of course black and white pens, mostly uniball gel.
I’ve been continuing to work on more pages for my 2011 Travel Journal. Luckily I had kept quite a lot of pamphlets, maps etc from our trip, and since the journal is a loose leaf one in a ring binder, I can add lots of pages retrospectively. I alsokept a brief diary of all the places we went so it has been easy to write about it. I have enjoyed this process so much,reliving memories of that trip and designing pages to celebrate each place we visited that I’m thinking of making my next travel journal in a similar loose leaf format so I can keep adding to it after the trip is over. This prolongs the pleasure!
Anyway, without further ado, here are the pages I have done over the last few months.
These are all in France, Provence, Carcassonne, the Dordogne, the Loire. I’m still working on the Paris pages.
Here are two backgrounds waiting for me to do something with them. This first one is a bit textured: I used some kind of plastic mat to stamp some gesso, painted over it with orange acrylic and rubbed it back so you could see the gesso underneath. I had also painted a few gesso words, I think “no thought” and “play”. When the orange was dry I painted burnt umber over all and rubbed it back too. The page sat like that for a few weeks waiting for some attention and everytime I looked at it it seemed to say “Fire”. Then one week in my art journaling class with Zom we were asked to create some black gesso areas on one of our backgrounds so I chose this one and painted black across the centre creating the flames. This is quite a strong background now, I don’t quite know how to approach adding something to it. It would be likely that the background would overpower anything I might stick on top of it! Will keep you posted.
Here is another background awaiting a “foreground”. It was created in a similar way to the previous one only in this one I collaged down some pieces first…some music, a black and white photocopy of a photo of me in younger days, a page from the dictionary with definitions of love.Then I stamped some gesso using bought stamps and bubble wrap, and when that was dry painted 2 different shades of blue. Obviously I don’t know many different techniques yet for creating backgrounds! This was actually really fun to do because I was showing my friend Ruth (who has recently acquired the art journaling bug!) a couple of background techniques and we were working together at my dining room table, and having a lovely relaxed creating time. Anyway, I do like this blue background and I trust that one day it will become clear to me what I must put over it!
Like many beginning art journalers I have come across the work of Teesha Moore, greatly admired it and thought that one day I would try to do something a little bit similar. I have watched her videos on youtube which are really excellent for new art journalers, well for anyone really. If you haven’t seen them HERE is a link to one.
So in what way is this similar to her work in those videos? Well there is a plain brightly coloured background, a border made of colourful strips, some kind of central collaged image made up of different images and some curly lettering. Oh and I used a pan pastel to do some shading around the edges. My initial intention was to make a central image which was more like hers, a bit zany, with weird parts of people and animals, maybe huge eyes and stripey legs etc, but I somehow couldn’t do it. I was really stalled on this page once I had made the borders. Eventually I realised that I didn’t want to copy Teesha THAT closely, I need it to be meaningful to me. Then I came across this large butterfly pic which I loved, and this pic of me being ecstatic in the temple at the Mana retreat centre in New Zealand just seemed to go so easily with the wings. Writing down some of the things that “give me wings” was really fun too.
Hello and welcome to my blog! I would love to share some of my art journaling journey with you. I’ve just discovered art journaling through attending some classes in Byron Bay with Zom Osborne , starting in September last year. You can visit her blog here.
I think it’s wonderful that art journalers can now connect and share with each other through the internet and blogging, and I want to be part of it. I hope you will come back from time to time and check out what I have been doing, and I invite you to comment if you feel to.
This is one of the first pages I made in the class with Zom. We brought in a photocopy of a photo of ourselves (this is me at 4 or 5 years old) and then painted it/altered it in some way.
Magical Child page
That is a photo of my parents at their wedding on the right. I was the 5th child in the family and was born quite a long time (8 years) after the first 4 and I was unplanned, so “appeared as if by magic”.
The quote at the top by the Irish mystic John O’Donohue says” May you realise that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here”. I think that I was affirming that even though I was an unplanned baby, I nevertheless have a right to be here, that I, like all of us, bring my own uniqueness to the world.