A calendar page in my journal

Whilst I was waiting to be sure of my word for this year I started making the calendar page.  I copied Valerie's idea from her blog post.

I bought Valerie's stencil and as soon as it came had a go with the washi tape - I have a lot of washi tape!

I printed out the calendar for January and auditioned it on the page.   I decided I didn't like the page on the left so painted it.

I used a lime Paper Artsy paint which looked much better.

I tried inking the page with Distress Oxide but didn't make a very good job of it.  I haven't used Distress Inks in a while!  Then I glued it down and made a mess of that also.  However it will do.

I used Valerie's stencil again for the month header and found a suitable quote online. I've written in all the things I know I'm doing already in January.

After a few days I decided to remove the ugly on the right hand page and redo it.  Although to be honest, it isn't much of an improvement!  

Ah well!  It will just have to do.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group: Living Your Word of the Year

Join Mary Brack, Valerie Sjodin and I in our Facebook group where we are giving participants the opportunity to live out an A-Z of their own word throughout 2019.  Mary explains what we are doing in her blog post.  We don't like a lot of rules, so we will have suggestions and options to spark creativity, and to help in recording and exploring our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. We will each blog about our experiences and our art.

 Living Your Word of the Year 2019

Hashtags on Instagram:  #livingyourword2019

Check out the other blogs:
Mary: www.foundonbrighton.com
Valerie: www.valeriesjodin.com/blog

To ensure you get updates from Valerie, Mary & I why not subscribe to our blogs.

The Road Not Taken

I am doing a Master Practitioner course with the School of Stitched Textiles.   The tutor suggested I might challenge myself to work with brighter colours than I usually use.  The first module uses a poem and a piece of music of my choice as the inspiration.

For the poem I have chosen The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.

The poem speaks of a yellow wood and my research led me to the fact that this might be birch trees or alder trees.  I was surprised at this as I have visited one of Frost's homes in New England.  Plus the poem was written for Frost's friend Edward Thomas who is English.

However, a piece on the BBC Countryfile programme solved the riddle.  Robert Frost and his family lived in the Cotswolds in England with Edward Thomas and his family living just across the fields.  They obviously walked in English woods.

I decided to concentrate on birch leaves - a decision helped by the fact that we have a silver birch tree at the bottom of our garden with a large sycamore behind it.

I started with some mark making on a large piece of paper.  I was aiming for the two paths diverging in the woods which the marks do represent but also look like branches and twigs.

I had a go at monoprinting with tree stencils designed by Valerie Sjodin.  Taking up the challenge to work in brighter colours I started with yellow and oranges.

Before I tore these up I scanned them into my computer and printed out smaller versions of the prints.   I collaged them into my sketchbook.

Then I moved on to using leaves.  I'll show you those in my next post.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

50 ways to leave your layer

Warning: there are a lot (and I mean a lot!) of photos in this post.

Last weekend I went to Art from the Heart in Harrogate for a weekend of two workshops led by Seth Apter.

The workshop on Saturday was '50 ways to leave your layer'.  We were given a Dylusions square journal and did one technique for each double page.  Some technique pages had more than one layer!

Smooshing - a type of monoprinting

Smooshing with others!   This works so much better with the black background rather than the white above.

Printing with texture

Splatter

Hidden background

Subtraction stencilling

Water splats!

Brayered

Two colours

Ombre

Free choice of techniques to do the cover.

On Sunday we did 'Mixed Media Mashup'.  We made one finished piece to take home using a variety of techniques following Seth's instructions.

My piece went from this first layer:

to this:

And in between were these layers:

Die cuts using Seth's Spellbinder Dies.

Auditioning the pieces

Improvements after advice from Seth

Added finishing touches

It was a fabulous full on weekend.  Thank you Seth.  Thanks to Art from the Heart for organising it and to my friend Carolyn who joined me for the weekend.

Well done if you've got this far.  I did warn you there were a lot of photos.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

More from my Venice project

I saw this blog post by Anna-Karin Evaldsson and thought I could do something similar for my Venice sketchbook.

Apart from the fact that I didn't have the same stencils, colours of paint or ink pads - but that aside I'd give it a go.  I stuck some Italy related bits and pieces that I had bought from Julie Kirk - she made this pack especially for me.  I painted over it with a yellow acrylic mixed with glaze medium.

I stencilled some brown paint.

Added some more stencilling with a flesh colour acrylic.

Stamped randomly over it all

Stencilled again and decided it was all rather brown.

So I mixed some yellow glaze and put it over the top and then decided it was too yellow!

So painted grey over it and then wiped some of it off.

I had mixed a lot of the yellow glaze so I stencilled a piece of Deli paper with it.

 I used gel medium to glue some pieces of painted repair tissue onto it.

I used some stamps designed by Michelle Ward and then I started on the red paint.  I read the instructions again - I wonder why really because apart from the number of layers it's nothing like Anna-Karin's piece.  Anyway she had said use texture paste.

I mixed the red paint with the fibre paste - which of course made it a bit pink!  Anyway, I stencilled the shapes with the fibre paste and then when it was dry tried to darken it with black paint and then lighten it with buff white.

By this time, I decided I'd be better off leaving it alone for a bit.  I will come back to it when I decide what it needs.  It's not saying Venice to me yet.

What would you do with it?

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

PS: If you would like to look back at the pages of my Venice sketchbook to date click on Venice in the list below.

Stencil Club

In November I joined StencilClub which is run by Stencil Girl.  I love Stencil Girl products and have quite a few!

The great thing about StencilClub is that the stencils are designed for and sold only to club members.  You get three stencils with each month of your subscription: one 9" x 12" stencil, one 6"x 6" stencil and one 4" x 4" stencil.

The first stencils I received were December's subscription.  I really wasn't expecting them to arrive before Christmas but they did!

And within 10 minutes I had put them to use making backgrounds.

I limited myself to 4 colours of paint and the 3 stencils and then just played using the Gelli plate.

I will probably print some more colours over the top next time I have the gelli plate out.  They need a pop of white or black I think.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice