A Few Art Journal Pages

I do love the freedom of "art journaling" - that I am creating something to experiment with techniques and doing it for my own gratification. Occasionally I worry that someone else won't think my work is up to snuff but I fight those feelings very stongly.

I am completely in awe of those people who manage to complete a page every day. In five years I might have finished thirty pages, but probably not. These are some of my latest. The three ladies with flowers must have been something I saw that inspired me. I got all of the backgrounds painted and all of the women pasted on in May 2011 when I did the "garden of dreams" page. And then the "gardeners dream bigger dreams" page got finished sometime in 2012. But the last woman left me wondering what she was thinking so hard about. I tried "pensive"and "contemplative" but she didn't tell me anything. I wanted flowers to match her mood but couldn't find any except on some old chintz. They were too big so I painted a few of them. And then I decided she was just sad and these song lyrics came to mind. The most worrisome thing is that there is another page ready that I'm drawing a blank on also.

The bird page was just a hoot. While my sister was here, one of the things I worked on a bit was a tag book of bird songs, i.e., songs that referenced birds. I had a bunch of stamped pieces lying around from that. Kate made a card for her daughter by using a very thin paste and piling scraps onto muslin and I wanted to try that but in my moleskine rather than on muslin. I loved how colorful it turned out, added more color plus the tree branch to make all of the images work together and found a perfect quote. I love it!!

Getting Dressed Altered Book

Kate had brought several altered books along to work on during our creative time together. I didn't have much planned so just made a few cards for the first few days. then I saw an article in the paper titled "You're Wearing That?" and took off with this little book. The book form is a child's board book, one of the cheapie ones that allow just peeling the slick printed pages out and you're left with empty, though slightly rough, pages to decorate. It really beats all that sanding!!

Kate had sent a GellyArt plate as a birthday gift to herself which we played with quite a bit. It's like a gelatin monoprint plate but you can clean it off and use it over and over - no melting! See, I'm not the only one who gifts themselves. We spent a lot of time pulling prints and ghosts of prints off the plate. My background for the "clothes make the man" was done with the plate. We decided it was a perfect two person project as one of us could be making a monoprint while the other one was cleaning off anything that got covered with paint. The GellyArt manufacturers do suggest paint rather than ink to keep from staining the plate. My birthday is way too far off!

In the book I used stamps, paint, pastel chalks, gesso, scrapbook papers and some collage. I added the zipper, buttons and lacing trim to accent the theme.

It looks like Blogger is going to put the last three pages first. But I'm taking notes - I'm sure to get it right sooner or later.

House and Home Accordion Book

I didn't have this ready for Kate's birthday in May but that was OK since she came for 10 days of pure play in June and it was finished by then. Plus I got to see her reaction which was great. We had the book stretched out on the buffet so that the "House" side was facing out and the "Home" side showed in the mirror. She saw the first side and told me how much she liked my new house book. Then I pointed out the images of her new home and of her and Bill in the mirror and told her it was her house book.

I had read about a new technique in "Flavor for Mixed Media" by Mary Beth Shaw of filling a background with patches of color with pastels and then painting over those with a layer of gesso. I used it for most of the backgrounds for the pages. It gave incredibly subtle colors. The bookform itself was a diecut kit of lightweight chipboard house shaped pieces. After the "House" side was done, I felt as if my brainpower was down to one bar or less so my friend Pam got me back in shape to work on the nine "home" collages with a few suggestions.