Sharon's Fabulous 16 Page Journal ala Teesha Moore

This is page 2 of the journal. It had been sitting waiting for a light bulb joke and a rainy day. Fortunately, just before it started raining I remembered that either Pam or I had thought of the song title I ended up using. If you haven't seen Teesha Moore's series of videos on creating a fabulous 16 page journal out of one 30" x 22" sheet of hot pressed water color paper, I hardily recommend it. Finding colored paper for the borders and sticking them on is great fun! That comes after sloshing paint on all of the pages, which is the state I showed in a previous post.
What I've tried doing with the pages I'm working on is using BJD faces from various sources embellished with mostly human eyes, using paper doll clothes and drawing fashion-like legs to lengthen the figures. Teesha said she felt using paper doll clothes seemed contrived to her although she did it on one of the pages she demo-ed. Since I adore paper dolls I wasn't put off by that and am considering titling the journal "Contrivances".
I also am trying to use words from older children's songs or books or nursery rhymes, although I'm finding that a little more difficult to match to the figures. I'm not a huge fan of Create, Believe, Art quotes for every journal page I work on. I think the process of doing the lettering is probably the most difficult for me. Pam gave me a few pointers a couple of weeks ago but I'm still struggling. That said, this is the best lettering I've done so far out of the seven I've attempted.

The "New Beginnings" Challenge

Today is the day that the new Sparkle and Glitter challenge, "New Beginnnings", goes up on the Sparkle and Glitter blog. After Christmas I had a bunch of new things to try. I colored the image, Francoise Clown, with my new Spectrum Noir pens. This is the third thing I've colored with them after the two cards in the previous post. I am not taking to them as easily as Rick did with his Creepmas posts but I do think this one shows a bit of improvement. Another new plaything was my GelliArts gel plate for monoprinting. My friend Pam and I played for a few days with our new plates. It's so much fun to find things to make textures with that the huge dining room table barely had room for a dishpan of water and our plates. The one I tore up for this journal spread was a deliberate attempt to make a light-colored background for my planned project. Additionally, I filled in the white spots with distress stains.



My third new thing was a pastel color scheme. It's not that I've never used it - but infrequently enough that it's quite alien to me.
The challenge goes for two weeks! Do you have something new you'd like to share with us there?

Two Journal Pages in One Day

My sister, Kate, is visiting for a few days and of course we are playing. This morning we set up a blog for her called Escape From the Library. There is a link in My Favs. Then we started art journaling. It was her first so she didn't get it finished but I did an amazing two in one day. The backgrounds are painted with acrylics and rubbed with soft pastels as usual but I did much more stamping on these pages than I have done before.