Adventures in Art Journalling or what a cock up

Can't believe it's been so long since I posted and not really sure why not but in my defence where has the last month gone?

So brief round up .......... end of June saw my mum's birthday with a nice carvery lunch out. Then we had our monthly crop at Whittle Le Woods and a home made chocolate cola cake with candle :o) The crop was fun, this month Kathb and I were in charge so we set a challenge for the group of a LO using the sketch from Sarah's cards blog, went down well too and my mum won first prize.

Beginning of July was our monthly crop over in Warrington run by Sarah and Lianne of Sarah's cards. Sadly, we found out a few days before that this was to be the last one :o( Seems there's no pleasing some folks and Sarah and Lianne were getting the brunt of it so fairly decided to call it a day. Very sad but I don't blame them and what a great last crop it was.

One of my favourite things living where I do and next to my fabulous neighbours is that they keep chickens and I love to watch out the window in a morning when Philip lets them out of their huts and they set off running down the fields to 'get the best spots'. This is fondly referred to as Chicken Run in our house and a source of great hilarity. So I was gutted to hear from Philip at weekend that a fox had massacred 20 chickens in one go the day before. So at the moment, the fields look quiet and strange and I miss the chickens and my morning smile. RIP feathered friends.

As mentioned previously I enrolled for Dina Wakely's Art Journalling 101 online course. What an excellent buy. I have been playing nicely, had quite a few disasters and one of two that I quite like but boy have I played.

Not a good attempt, couldn't get the paints to remove, found out was using the wrong gesso and paints (craft paints)

Another bad one, the stamping into the gesso worked but the paint was still wrong. Was using arondak dabbers.

This one I'm happy with. Bought the liquitex student gesso (bit thin really) and Chroma art student acrylic paints (good but really thick and taken a lot of messing to get them to the right consistancy). Pental oil pastels (Amazon for a great price) and some of Dyan's new spray inks (which are awesome).

These ones I didn't dilute the paint enough but I do quite like them ....

Can you just see the pattens in the gesso?

This one is a bit of a mix of techniques, gesso base, arondak paint dabbers, gesso stencilled on top and Dyan's inks again. This is lifted from Kate Crane's blog - thanks Kate :o)

The borders here are a mixture of home made, vintage stuff, 7 gypsies papers and Dyan's downloads

So as you can see, I have been playing and trying different styles of background. Another great site I've been following is JournalArtista on Utube. This Canadian lady does some great journalling and has done some tutorials on different mediums which are really helpful. Here are a couple of my attempts at her style ......

This is her watercolour tutorial, which walks you through the whole entry from start to finish. Mine isn't quite finished but you can see how much effort she puts into her pages. This has about 5 layers on it so far.

These are 2 pages using acrylic paints and again aren't finished. There's a full several episode tutorial on this as well and worth a look at.

This one is another work in progress and based on the Teesha Moore school of art journalling, so loads more to do on it.

So as you can see, I've had a great time playing, making mistakes and learning what does and doesn't work. I'm also starting to find I like some styles more than others so watch this space. There are some really good sites for free downloads of pictures and some great sites where you can purchase bits to add to your pages. I'll do another post highlighting where I've shopped for goodies next week.

I've also managed a little bit of scrapping :o)

and altered a bingo board that I picked up for £1.50 whilst up in Scotland visiting

Before

After - used the remnants of one of Sarah' cards monthly scrap booking kits

Well I guess thats pretty much enough for today, bit of a blog overload :o)

It just leaves me one last thing and then I'll go make a cake and thats to wish my Dad ...........

A Very Happy Birthday xxxxxx