Getting back to arty pursuits….slowly

Well, son is safely back in LA (or as safe as one CAN be in LA) and much of the trauma and turmoil of recent months has settled down a bit.  We have a decision on DDs further education from the SEN panel and it is good news from almost all aspects, my health is as good as it has been since the onset of the NAM, my meds are reasonably well figured out, and I have found the time and energy to be creative.  We have made progress on the house and the garden and at least for today, the sun is shining – no mean feat for June in England!

I thought I would share the pages as a result of the Permission to Play class by Carolyn Dube.  I felt so out of practice, my mojo well and truly gone walkabout, that I thought a structured class that stressed no rules, just play, would be a great way to stay focused.  And I feel like that DID happen.  I made the ATCs last week, while beginning on the cardboard pages of the journal for the class.  But then life intervened and they sat, bare and unloved, waiting for me to be ready.  This morning, while DH and DD were off ice skating, I started Breakfast at Tiffany’s  on Audible and by the end of its 3-hour run time I was pretty much done with the pages and the lessons up to the binding.

The covers are bits of a beer carrier box, I think.  I’ve had them squirreled away for a few years, awaiting a project.  I like the hand-hold holes!  The left page in the photo above is a total OOPS, or Outstanding Opportunity Presenting Suddenly, as CD calls a big mess! I have been feeling like my desk is smaller than it used to be and I finally figured out that it is, and why – I lost the HUGE WIDE window ledge in the old house, that extended my desk widthwise, and as I don’t have my computer desk, my working space and the side desk all in a row, I am working on a MUCH smaller area!  That causes overlap

The reverse of one of the pages sat on top of my paint palette and picked up a lot of colour, in shade that couldn’t help but make mud.  With some spray ink and some white paint thru a stencil it ended up being OK, but def. one for the back of the journal LOL!

Other pages:

The only one that I managed to identify something in the Spark is the middle one above, with what I see as a very dejected fellow leaning against a wall.  There is also one Spark page that is still bare.

Overall I am pretty happy with the pages as a base for more stuff.  I feel a need to let it all fester in my brain for a bit before moving on.  I am also inclined to consider another binding method than the ribbon – I’ve never been a fan of ribbon binding and while it does seem like the best option from a practical for a class standpoint, I just feel I will end up being less happy with it.  I’m hoping the festering will either present me with another suitable option or the time will let me come to grips with it!

On a side note, while watching the class I was tickled pink to catch a glimpse of something on her shelf:

I thought Hey! I recognize that! and indeed it was a little thing I sent her 5 years or so ago. I surely intended to cut apart EVERYDAY to make EVERY DAY and didn’t.  DOH! So me.  And so nice of her to display it despite the error.  Oops.

I have another project on the go, unrelated to art, that I will also share, but not today!

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Android Wear is just too much fun.

So we got Android Wear watches last year.  I have a Huawei, but only because I left my Moto 360 at my parents house when we went home for Christmas and had to get a replacement.  I love it.  And fortunately DS wanted the Moto and he stayed longer than we did on the East Coast, so he ended up taking mine back to Cali with him – and he might be able to use it once I send him the charger LOL!

I do love my Apple computer but the design possibilities for Android Wear is so much more fun.  I sat down with the Facer app (the browser version) and took some images from my Art Journal and turned them into watch faces.

In a few minutes, I was able to make four faces – all these came from Art Journal pages I have previously done.

The bug us a stamp.  You’ll recognize it from the new header on my blog. The AJ page:

This is the only one I did with watch hands.  I like the fact I can upload my own fonts to use, and the digital time looks better, to my eye.  The next one used a snippet from the same page, but from an in-process photo:

The date is actually easier to read than it looks here.

Then I did another AJ page snippet:

One of my favourite pages.  The watch face looks like this:

The bit at the bottom is called the “flat tire” and is what allows you to swipe up to access another screen.

On the last one I used a couple of fonts I like a lot:

Might be a bit too much my style, but of course I love it. And the AJ page:

I have 100s of ideas using bits and pieces – Gelli prints, stamps, ATCs….I think this is going to be fun.

Now I just have to sort out getting the faces onto the actual WATCH.  DD and I are sharing an Android phone, for the purposes of watch face design, but I hope to get these added to my actual watch very soon.

So you had a bad day Printables – by request

I am always interested in what my visitors are interested in when it comes to printables.  And when someone takes the time to get in touch, asking about a specific topic they are struggling to find, I like to at least have a go. Last week I got this, via email:

I love your page. I just found it a couple of months ago. I have a strange request for journal page…well I guess two request. One if for sayings for when you’re sick and the other is for when you’re having a bad day. Not every days is wonderful and sometimes it just downright sucks. I’m pretty honest in my journal. Like how getting sick with the flu New Year’s Eve SUCKED!! 

Whatever you come up with would be cool.

I had to look back.  The closest I came to a “bad day” sort of printable was this set, from ages ago. Not really fitting the bill, but generic enough they COULD be used for both a minor illness and a bad day or bad event.

I had a bit of a think and came up with this set for her.

The font is called Character Cats – I’ve had it for a while, have no idea where I originally got it from, but found it for download here. I did quite a bit of post-processing it to turn the scribbled line-only glyphs into faces, as well as changing all the little smiles to frowns.  I didn’t want them to be overwhelmingly  sad-looking, so they walk the line between sort of cute and sort of sad.  I know there are two distinct camps.  There are those who, like the requestor, prefer that their albums and journals are a true depiction of life, good and bad.  And there are those who think life is too short to focus on the negative, so their albums are all about the happy times.  Getting something that works at least a bit for both is HARD.  I have some ideas for a “sick day” version, but it seems trickier to me.  We’ll see.

Now, given that this request mentioned her “journal” rather than her album, it occurred to me that these might be useful in the 1/2 size I do sometimes, for using in a Smash book, a filofax style journal, or an art journal, it if is more collage than paint and ink.  So I went ahead and converted the PDF to that size as well.

The 3×4 Project Life PDF sheet is here

The 1/2 size (about 2 1/4 x 3 inch), 10 card sheet is here.

Have fun with them?

Enjoy?

hope they are useful?  Oh dear.

Hope you never need to use them!

{wink}

ADL book look

Against the clock this morning, as my power is due to go out for the day while they carry out some electrical work in my area. But here is a quick look at my handmade A Documented Life book.

Sorry it’s a little dark.

The baseball card sleeve is sewn in, just like the page signatures are, so my book includes elements of the ADL planner, as well as Project Life style (albeit in the smaller ATC/Baseball cards size) photo sleeves.  The photos are not current, but I slipped a few in to show you the basic idea.

The door photo in the first photo, opened up in the second, was interesting to do.  I took photos of the three doors to the house then converted them to “stamps” in PSE and coloured them with coloured pencils.

The journaling is about the fact that DH and I have no real set “location name” for the three doors – we call two doors “the front door” and two doors the “back door” and two doors the “kitchen door” depending on the context – the causes amusement, annoyance and frustration in equal parts.

With the power out I won’t be able to do any online work so I can happily sit at my desk and work on completing the pages to close in on the current week.  I just quickly have to print a few more of the date and day word sheets so I can cut n’ paste them.

With luck it’ll all go smoothly and I’ll be back online sooner than state instead of later.  Fingers crossed!

A Documented Life journal

I thought it was about time I caught you up on this.  Progress is not as fast as I would like and I am slipping behind every day.  My thought was the best way to drop in to this so late in the year was to make the bare bones of all the pages up to the current dat.  It’s fun but time-consuming.  I came up with a few shortcuts, mostly (surprise, surprise!) by creating digital bits to print.  I would imagine that if I carry on doing it I would do more from scratch.  My plan is to begin doing it and create a month of pages just before the first of the month, so I can just get into the habit of updating it daily.

I already talked about my tabs.  I joined the FB group (must be driven, cause you KNOW I think Facebook is evil and not much will drive me there) and saw this post by Carole.  I loved the stripe-y border she used but couldn’t tell if it was cut from paper, stamped, doodled… My method of accomplishing it was to print out a sheet of stripes then slice it into thin strips.

That way I can print as many as I like and don’t have to keep finding checkerboard or striped paper.

Then I did a background or two – at this point, in the interest of speed, I am looking to get them done – I’m playing around with a few techniques and this one grew out of my concern that the Inktense blocks are…intense.  To soften them I decided to scribble on the page, but when it came to blending them I used a damp baby wipe that had been dipped in a smidge of gesso.  I liked the effect. Much softer colour and maybe you can see I really used very little of the blocks in the scribbling.

To get some pattern in there, but again, quite soft, I brushed some gesso onto one of the texture plates I made from the anaglypta wallpaper for using on the Gelli plate.  That gave me a nice enough print (although it probably doesn’t show up in the photo as well as it does IRL.

You can see that texture pad is caked with acrylic paint, but it didn’t transfer when printing with it.

So then I decided to try rubbing the side of the Inktense block onto it and misting it with water to activate the ink.

That gave me a much darker impression.  Def. will do THAT again – I have A LOT of these texture pads that I’ve made and lots more (a near endless supply) of options cause I can tear off a “sample” at all of the wallpaper departments of about 5 or 6 different stores i my area.  I only need a few inches, although these are more like A4 size cause I wanted them for the bigger Gelli plate.

I carried on adding the little date and day printouts (cut ‘n paste) and did one page using thin Washi Tape for the divides.

So far so good.  If I can do a month a day (unlikely) I’ll probably be ready to start properly in a week.  I did do the January prompt (front door) but as this is already long I’ll add that tomorrow, along with a better look at the elements that make my book different.

I am also reading Flash Boys (I adore Michael Lewis, back since Liar’s Poker) and have a little Rainbow Baby doll on the go for a fellow WOYWWers charity project, plus the crochet circles…. just too many things and all of them vying for my time.  {sigh}

A fire lit….

I follow a fellow WordPress blogger called KittyisnotAmused.  As she says, she is, at best, an intermittent blogger, with long pauses between posts- unlike me, who blathers on, day after day – but I often feel her posts are little gems.  Today was one.

I’ve created an art journal (AGAIN)  with no clear idea how I’ll be using it.  I still have space in the paper-bag one (although not that much) but I can feel myself slipping away again.  I need to reel myself in and tether to the journaling dock, lest I slip out to sea, IYKWIM.  I had read hints about A Documented Life and was curious, but there never seemed to be the time to really sit down and have a look at it.  Today I did.  Sounds like the kind of art journaling I can sink my teeth in to.  As I commented on Kitty’s blog, once you allow something to become a HABIT, then it becomes a hard habit to break LOL! This sort of perhaps daily journaling, with intermittent longer sessions to do the prompts, sound like the sort of thing I could do and really keep up with.  I do wish I had bothered to research it in JANUARY, but hey, ho.

So I though, as the current journal is still in progress, with only three signatures sewn in. I would take a quite radical step – brace yourselves:

Yep. Snip Snip.

OK so that is the first task done.  The HARDER task is to sort out the already created signatures to accommodate the 2014 weekly layout.  Each signature is 8 sides, with one of them (or two of them, depending) left with a pocket from the envelopes I used to make the pages.

The question is, how do I arrange them so the pockets fall within the number of weeks for each month, so every month has a side for the prompt (rather than sticking a loose sheet in, as mentioned in the ADL project info) and there are no wasted sides??

The first thing I did was quickly Google the week layout of 2014.  I annotated it for myself, noting the monthly breaks and the number of pages I would need for each month.

It looks hard to read, but click the image and you can see it bigger. with that info I think I can now create the rest of the leaves so I can arrange them to ensure there is a pocket page within each month.  So long as I don’t get hung up on the pocket being the FIRST or the LAST leaf, then I think it’s do-able, although it might work out that, for example, two months share a pocket.  I’ll need to work thru it to see.

Another idea I had while reading Kitty’s post was that I could reinforce the envelopes by sewing the day divides on those pages.  That means deciding if I want to sew every one or if it works out better to sew most of them, but draw lines on the pocket pages so I can still use one side as a planner page – for months (most of them) where the 1st of the month falls mid-week (so a single week contains more than one month) I need to decide if I carry the days on in a continuous way or if I duplicate a week where part of it falls in one month and the rest in another.  My gut feeling is a continuous line, only because duplicating weeks that are split means more pages and as it is I think I’m just about going to manage it by doubling the signatures I have already made (24 leaves) and adding one more.

Then I have to decide if I want to go back thru iCal and deal with the weeks I’ve missed or just drop in well into the year?  I’m leaning towards hitting a few highlights based on my calendar, my blog, and e-mail, but not worry about something every single day.

I am thinking that making this my first small task every day, then doing the prompt art-page once a week is very manageable.  It feels like everything is sort of coming together, with all the pitfalls of journaling overcome.  Is that just wishful thinking?  Perhaps.  But at least I have a plan that has logical steps and I always work better that way.  So let’s see how I go…

Thanks for lighting the fire, Kitty….

(yes, I am aware that is probably not your REAL name but I’m struggling to find a place where you might have mentioned it…)

 

Bet you thought I abandoned that AJ…

…but I didn’t.  The envelopes are working well, I think, and I have the three sets sewn in with room for at least three more.

Some of the pages have the pockets but I really needed to extend the gesso further in.

The background was done with scribbles of the Inktense. and I used my fave silicone hot pad to stamp the hexagons – I just wiped over it first with a baby wipe then rubbed the Inktense block over it then stamped.

a couple of my in-process shots didn’t save (had to recharge my camera batteries – DOH!) but I hope you get the idea.  Boy do they come up INTENSELY coloured.

You can see two bits that used gilding flakes.  The little flecks are just a few flakes that I dusted over the still damp acrylic medium. And then I dropped a chunk of drywall tape into the box and scrubbed off the excess.  The flakes stuck great to the adhesive on what os meant to be the BACK and I just stuck it down with other adhesive.

I took some shots in the afternoon sun and some in the dismal overcast morning, hence the variations…You can see the spine in this shot.

I also did a title to add, coloured with the blocks as well.

Hard to see all the layers of colour but there are many….

And it will just fit, if overlapped, to the side of the flap. Considering many alternatives for the closure but I may end up with a bit of ribbon or fabric threaded thru the spine stitching and used as a tie.

It’s fairly large, about 8.5 x 12, so plenty of room!  It’s big enough that I can actually slip into one of the pockets a few pages from one of my previous attempts at art journaling if I want to house all those pages in one place as that is more or less just a few sheets, folded and sewn into a pamphlet.  I only did maybe two completed pages and a background spread in it so I may disassemble it so I can slip those pages into a pocket, not sure yet.

My room is littered with floating shreds of gilding so it may be time to put that back on the shelf.  And while my room is still extremely tidy, my desk has devolved back into a bit of a mess…

 

Gilding flakes on Modelling paste

Rather scatterbrained today – our mail server has been down for nearly 2 days and the US ISP isn’t addressing it as quickly as we’d like, so worried I am missing out on some critical mail. But I guess that just leaves me more time to get crafty LOL!

So the shot of my desk yesterday showed an experiment.  I got a set of the Inktense blocks.  Frankly I wasn’t super keen on them until I read you can grate them and mix with water to create inks that are permanent when dry.  Now THAT is something I am very interested in.  My plan had been to have a go at this over some modelling paste, but as I had JUST tidied up (massively) and stuff I hadn’t used in ages was still in my short-term memory, I thought  I wonder…?

and grabbed my pot of gilding flakes.  My feeling was that the modelling paste, while wet, would grab the flakes.  When it dried, the flakes would not only be stuck, they would be stuck strong. So while the paste was damp (ie maybe 5 mins or so after applying? )  It should still glisten on the surface but if you touch it, it should feel semi-solid

I scattered on some gilding flakes – this bag is one I got ages ago and the flakes are very large, almost like sheets, 2 or 3 inches square.  I laid them over gently, covering the surface on 1/2 of the modelling paste figure.

I left the paste to dry totally then whisked away the flakes with a brush.  Personally, I think that scrubbie thing that comes with the flakes dulls the shine so I don’t really use it.

I think the bare areas might have been down to me not pressing the flakes into the paste or, for the tiny areas, that bit being drier than the rest.  But overall I felt the coverage was good and I was able to whisk pretty briskly and the flakes stayed stuck.

So what I expected to work was to re-lay the stencil then sponge the FlitterGlu over the dried modelling paste then gild as usual.

I did that on the OTHER half.  And it worked as expected. So far so good.  I left it for a while to make sure the paste and glue was dry.  Then I grated up some of the Inktense block, mixed in a bit of water, and make a spray.  Easy Peasy.

I sprayed that over the gilded area, and let it dry.

Nice and watercolour-y – you can vary the vibrancy by adding more (or less) water. Now here is where it gets odd.  What I hoped to do was buff away the ink before it totally dried (’cause I keep hearing it is PERMANENT WHEN DRY) to reveal the gilded areas.

Yeah. Right.

So what I had read, and seen on videos, is that you can layer other wet mediums over he Inktense and it will not smear.  With this in mind I used a slightly damp baby wipe to wipe away the mist from the surface of the gilding flakes.  Two things to note – first, the flakes that were embedded in the modelling paste stayed put nicely.  The ones applied over the FlitterGlu?  Not so much.

The left is the FlitterGlu.  But I also noted that the Inktense spray DID wipe away, at least partially. Not so water-fast then.

I suspect I need to experiment a little more with this.  But overall, I like the application of the gilding flakes over the modelling paste idea.  It could be quite an interesting technique on an AJ page, certainly for a top layer.  Likewise, I suspect glitter would embed nicely – and if it were a top layer then the FlitterGlu method would work as well, but why add another consumable resource if you don’t need to IYKWIM?  As to the Inktense mists, again, more testing.  Maybe heat setting it for longer rather than just letting it dry might help it remain water-resistant , not sure.  I know it is easy to scribble with the block then blend with a baby wipe and not wipe it away totally so it is at least slightly water-resistant.  And the colour is rich and deep.  But I am glad I had a go at the idea on a piece of paper rather than in my AJ.  I think I’ll enjoy pushing these blocks to their artistic limits, trying out a few ideas I have, to see what works. And I’ll be sure to report back!

 

A new Art Journal from envelopes

My existing AJ is starting to get full. It wasn’t too big to begin with so that isn’t surprising – although *I* am surprised I’ve managed to make more than 2 pages and haven’t abandoned the process yet.   LOL!

Anyway, if you read here often you know I like making stuff from scratch.  I had an idea t make an AJ that shared some of the properties of a paper bag book, in that it included areas to stash stuff.  When at Staples, looking for something totally unrelated, I found these massive envelopes.

I thought there was an idea there.  I’ve started my folding each envelope in half, up to the edge of the fold-over flap

Note they are called “manilla” when in fact they are more like heavy paper bags.  That is what I keep banging on about – the UK manilla isn’t like the US manilla..oh would that it was.  I knew they paper was likely to allow bleed thru so I decided to gesso the pages before constructing the book.

Some of the pages got scraped gesso, some got brushed gesso, and some got either one, then folded together and pulled apart to produce texture, then left to dry.

But another serendipitous thing – while at the grocery store I grabbed a cheap kid’s dough modelling toolkit. It had a pizza cutter in it so I used that as a texture tool.  It is blunt so should also work fab on the Gelli plate!

See how simple, but cool, are the marks?

And there is a wavy scallop as well!

I think having the pages ready to go will mean no more fear of the blank page.

The whole toolkit was so cheap and in addition to the pizza cutter and the wavy cutter there are some other useful items – the paddle scraper is handy, the little hard brayer might be interesting with some wire or rubber bands wrapped around it, and the little interchangeable tools I’ve not yet thought much about, but I’m sure they will make some interesting marks. Check out that price…

So I’ll be Gesso-ing like made while the sun shines and the pages can dry outside with the laundry. I’m thinking that a series of sewn signatures (maybe two envelopes each, with the flaps one side, then reverse the envelope for the other side) with a hard matboard cover (maybe even stuck inside a folded envelope?  not sure of that) will make a nice sturdy book.  The size is good, and I imagine I could stash all manner of bits inside the open envelope (loose pages, written or even typed journaling, photos or magazine articles or newspaper clippings that have been annotated by me…) so long as they aren’t bulky.  It’ll be interesting to see how it works out/IF it works out…

LOL!  Probably doomed to failure, if I were superstitious, as this is my 1300th post….

AJ page – Storm in my head (stencil shift)

I was thinking about the fact that I so often make stencils Using my Cricut.  Not everyone has one, so I was thinking of stencils I could make with other tools.  I thought about windows, and my Nestabilities.

So I took a filmstrip die – now this die cuts as a rectangle, and I thought that would suit my purposes.

On a Gessoed page I sponged on dark green paint

Replacing the stencil but shifting it slightly (I know I saw this someplace – could have been a Stencil Girl video but it’s been a while so I’m not sure) I sponged some lighter lime green paint over it. They key here is that you need good coverage and heavy bodied paint.

It gives it a bit of a halo effect.  I added some olive-green Pitt pen, smudged along the join of the two paints for a little more depth, but given how much I layers over it, it was perhaps a wasted step!

I scribbled some purples onto the background

and blended them with a baby wipe, letting some of the purple skitter over the rough texture of the page

Then I carried on with the usual – some stencils, some stamps, some punchinella stenciling, some tiny scripty text, and some BIG stamps in black.  That gave me a nice complex background.  Over a particularly busy area, I stencilled a face that I cut (sorry, back to the Cricut, but this time with SCAL tracing the image.

I masked the lower compass so it (I hope) looks like it’s in front of the face. I stamped the “title” – do you call it a title when it’s and AJ page?  I do, but more as a way to call a particular page to mind,  less as a TITLE, IYKWIM.

Now off to file paperwork.  And maybe try to finish up the last two cards from the Marathon – although cause I have to photo of the sample and only the barest memory of what the cards actually looked like, that may all come to nothing…..