Family Traditions: Art Journal Page

Family Traditions:

Next time I art journal I'll fill in the right side; those hot air balloons should be fun to work with.

Favorite Days: Art Journal Pages

Favorite Days of the Year:

Cookie Day: Chris and I celebrate the anniversary of 

meeting more then we celebrate our wedding anniversary. 

We call that day, ‘Cookie Day’

Easter: I think it’s the most important religious holiday 

and I love making resurrection buns with the kids and 

reading the Easter story.

Pancake Day/- Shrove Tuesday: We always have pancakes with 

bacon or sausage and tell stories about pancake dinners at 

my church when I was a kid and how my Grandpa would offer to 

do all the dishes so, “the women can put their feet up and 

gossip a bit.”

Any day that it snows.

Overheard: Art Journal Page with Stampotique

This is the background I started with. 

The hearts really didn't suit the topic so I altered it a bit with Inktense blocks and some Balzer Design stencils by Crafter's Workshop.

Then I decided I didn't like the green so I painted over the background with white.

And added back less muddy green and blue.

And here are the finished pages, gessoed again, of course :-)

Love my Stampotique Stamps. They've been so much fun to add to my art journal.

10 Years Ago and Super Powers

I'm trying to catch up on my 30 Lists so I did two more art journal pages last night.

The first topic was, '10 Years Ago..." This was really heading into sad territory so I focused on the facts - like that my boys were 3, 4 and 5 and we had amazing friends, I was researching homeschooling. 

I started out with this:

And made this:

She is a favorite Stampotique stamp of mine called Glimmering Hope

On the other side I used the prompt, 'My Superpowers' and I didn't worry about the two sides matching. I decided that it's all me so some sort of continuity should present itself.

The heart was some leftover Ouchless Cardboard from Gauche Alchemy that I used the area around it in this Love Birds AJ page:

See:

And I used a mix of stickers, rub-ons and words from magazine pages for the text.

The wings on the heart are Bombshell Stamps from the Sacred Heart set. It was one of my first sets and I still reach for it often. Gotta love that kind of staying power. After cutting the wings out, I Mod Podged them to the heart and background and then, once dry, colored them with Sakura gel pens.

Here are the pages side by side. click to see them full-sized.

And I wanted to thank my friend Eileen for the Versatile Blogger Award, so sweet of you.

Toys and Tools to Try: 30 Lists

I'm four lists behind right now. *sigh* As soon as I grasped that I was going to be missing eleven lists due to our vacation I sort of lost my mojo. Which is completely silly because the lists will be here when I get home.

But mojo is a fickle thing and it rarely responds to logic. So today I decided to get back at it and enjoy making all these luscious pages while I can and do the rest when I get back.

This was a fun topic as I adore tools. Not die cutting machine type of tools - blow torch types of things. It's fun to hammer, burn, pound, wreck and restructure raw materials until they're new and visually exciting. One of my favorite smells is grease - the kind that coats wire, not what you fry fish in - yeah, I'm weird like that.

The opposite page was one I made last August. I thought about going back into it and messing about. Adding some layers, making it integrate better. But that is where I was at and it's important to honor that too.

Happy Places

Well friends, I've made it to the end of one of my worst weeks in recent memory. My bone disease and various health issues kicked up with a wild vengeance and I found myself trying to craft (and trying to cope) with arms that would not cooperate, a rib cage that wouldn't let me breathe and a spine that often made physically getting to my supplies really and truly impossible. But here, facing a gloriously sunny Friday, I can count my wins:

1. My boys were clothed, fed home cooked meals (thank heaven for things in the freezer like my Turkey Dinner Meatloaf!) and carted to their various teams and events. Yes, I didn't always make it out of the passenger seat; but they did.

2.  My husband was loved, honored and cherished... I'd say 'obeyed' but then we'd all hurt ourselves falling off our chairs laughing. I'm crap at obeying :-)

3. My house is not much worse... small praise but praise all the same.

4. I made art everyday. It helps me keep the essential kernel of "me-ness" that this ridiculous situation can sometimes try to sneak off with.

Using Backgrounds You DON'T Love When Art Journalling

I thought I'd use this post to answer a few questions I get asked over and over again in comments and via email about my art journalling.

The first is something to the effect of "What paper is that in your journal. I love all the pretty colors? Who makes that?" Um... I do. This is what my journal looks like:

And just in case you don't believe me (and several people haven't) , here's a page with the background done... see, white pages come next. 

"What do you mean, 'You make backgrounds?'" Well, I fill up those lovely white pages with whatever I feel like doing at the time. It's nice to get rid of all that white. My method is to brush gesso on the raw pages and let it dry. I do this so the supplies I use on top smear around and blend better. It also gives the page a little tooth.

Here are some backgrounds in my art journal waiting to be called into action.

Which brings me to, "What do you do when you hate a background?"

You just need to have a little faith. 

Which brings me to today's page and the awful, embarrassing atrocity it started out as.

You're welcome. Now that we've all had our laugh today... I tore off the tape. It didn't work.

Then I sanded off all the gel pen scribbles. 

Wipe the mess off with paper towel. Already it's looking better. Still bad, but better.

Next Question, "What is punchinella/ sequin waste?" Only the BEST thing to hit crafting in the whole wide world! It's what's left over when sequins are made and it's an awesome stencil. I get mine from Gauche Alchemy and use it, literally, at least five times a week. Seriously! They're having a 10% off sale right now. Go shop.

Mine is all stained and grody... just the way I like it.

Which leads me to the rescue mission of getting this page to normal.

Apply gesso through the punchinella with a brush, credit card of palette knife. Move the punchinella as needed to cover as much of the page as you'd like.

Dry it with your heat tool. My gesso is cheap so the color shows through... I kinda like that for this page. Now the house, flowers and sun are nice color accents.

Next you need to add color. I'm trying to get familiar with with my new Derwent 12 Inktense Block Tin Setso I'm making using them a priority.

To add color with intense blocks, all you do is rub the block on your page and then add water with a wet paintbrush. A little Inktense goes a really long way on the gesso.

To keep things simple I stayed in the blue/green family.

To add depth, I rubbed a little navy around the edges. Contrast always makes a piece better.

Now I need something to make my list on as the background is too bumpy to write on. Every year in January I paint over all the pages from last year's calendars. It's a great source of interesting paper and only costs you the paint. 

I cut it down to 8.5x11 and typed up my list.

Cut your list into strips and decide where to place them.

Mod Podge them down and add some outlining. Done.

(click to see it larger)