Last Few Journal Pages - Long Post!

Here are the last few pages from my art journal from 2005. Some are a bit personal and I wasn't sure whether I wanted to show them or not. Then I thought how they helped me work through some stuff a little and so maybe they might inspire someone else to do the same.

So, this one was a challenge to make a 'cartooned' image by tracing over a photo etc. The background is just differnt ink pads pressed onto the page. The photos are attached by little coloured brads.



I remember the theme for this one - it was 'sludge'. So I just wrote about feeling 'sludgey' and annoyed! The background was some scribbling with coloured pencils, some fabric triangles and a lot of black acrylic as well! Written on with a black Sharpie pen and a very blobby white pen! Oh yes and a flower with a plaster on - there must have been some highly symbolic reason for that at the time I'm sure!!



This one was 'what's on your coffee table?'. At the time I didn't have a coffee table, so I wrote about that. Background was collage of pages from magazines/papers etc, paint/ink and stamping. I quite liked the colours of this one.



I think this challenge was to do something with colours you don't usually 'do'. Mine was blue. Background looks like paint, then collage with magazine papers and some stamping again.



Not sure what this was supposed to be, but I think I used bleach on a photo of myself. Yes, bleached and then used paint/ink on it to see what happened. Collaged and painted background and some writing/stamping/sanding and dymo labelling.



This is one of the personal ones. Acrylic paint and gesso background with collage and photo. Not my favourite page in a creative sense but it was about we'didn't have in our house'. My thing was that we nearly didn't have Lucy because she was very sick when she was born.



I'm guessing there was a 'time' theme going on here. I think the background was scrunched paper with ink rubbed over and I tried some method of transferring images here too but I can't recall how to do it now. Some collage and manipulated photo of me with a 'lidded' head. That must be how my brain escaped!



This is a favourite of mine. I love the colours and the content (raspberries yay!). Gesso and paint background with collage and stamping. The little strip of paper on the raspberries reads 'a recipe for slut red raspberries with chardonnay jelly' - don't you love the description (I'm thinking this is one of Nigella's!)



The last one! A more personal one about how I wished my kids would stop growing! They grow up so fast, it's just not fair - my thoughts on that.



I hope you enjoyed seeing the pages. There are more pages but no pictures of them. Incidentally, I like to use Pink Pig books for my journals - they are fantastic and the quality of the pages is fantastic, you can really slap on the paint/gesso etc without worrying they will disintegrate. They come in a number of shapes/sizes - try them out if you haven't already!

More Journal Pages

Here are another couple of pages from the Art Journal. This one was about books - you'd never have guessed eh? I can't remember how I did the background but there is a circle of handwriting which I overlaid with a printed acetate. I had made a pattern of text going round in a circle and then printed onto the acetate using the computer. It's not my favourite colourwise, but I was pleased to get the acetate printing right!



This one was probably my favourite - I just liked the colours probably! This one was probably gessoed first then had the image added, then smeared in some areas with vaseline, then painted over with acrylic (or acrylic mixed with gesso) and when dryish rubbed with a kitchen towel so that where the vaseline was, bits rub off and give a nice patchy effect. As you can see there was a bit of stamping with foam/rubber alphabet stamps - not sure at what stage this happened though. I can't recall the theme for this one but it may have been a word association type thing.

Art Journal 2005

A while ago (well, in 2005 to be exact) I took part in an online Art Journal class run by Shimelle. We had frequent 'prompts' to get us motivated and give us ideas for our journals. It was the first time I'd tried anything like that and I quite enjoyed it really, it made me think about things and it also made me start to 'create' again during a time where I hadn't been creative for a while. Since I am (still) waiting for my camera to return to me, I thought I'd share some of the pages of the journal with you.

Bear in mind that these are not of any great artworthiness (is that even a word?), just me 'footering' about with glue and paper etc.

This is the front cover of the journal, I'm afraid the flash has made some of the images impossible to see.

I think this was the first page, full of blethers!

I'm guessing the theme here was risk - lol! I think it was probably something like 'are you a risk taker or...?'

Another page, not sure of the prompt here - it was a while ago.

I have more pages but I won't bore you with them all here! I think one of the best things was just getting out the paint, gessoing up the pages, cutting out bits of paper, glueing etc etc - just like being a kid again - and most importantly being 'brave' enough just to write down anything that came to mind, no matter how trivial or ridiculous it seemed! I might like to do it again someday.