February and March Journaling

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!

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!