Ziggy zaggy

This week I have been playing with some more with concertina or zigzag books!

I had previously made some monoprints on mixed media paper so that I could make books. Here's the pile of prints and left over collage bits.

I used my own poem A Poetic Conundrum on this one.

I made this into a beach themed book and used words from a scrapbook paper pad

This third one used the words of another of my poems

You can read the poems on this post: Oh my word!

Thanks for joining me today.

Happy Easter

Bernice

More concertina

In my last post I showed you the beginning of a new concertina book.

I decided to use the theme of Florida rather than just do abstract painting.  I used some paper napkins I had bought in Florida many years ago and glued them onto the pages.

I worked on the book 4 pages at a time and then opened it up to see what it looked like.

I forgot to take a photo of the first four pages so I have had to crop it from the photo above.

Then I started adding layers of thinned down transparent acrylic paint.

I did the same with each of the sets of 4 pages.

When I had finished all four sets of 4 pages I again opened up the paper to see what it looked like.

Now it's all dry I shall go back to it and add more layers with pens and crayons.  And possibly some more collage papers.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Experimenting or playing?

Whichever it is, it's what I was doing!

I put a very thin layer of black acrylic paint on the gel plate and smoothed a magazine page onto it.  It needs to be black and white with high contrast.  When I pulled the magazine page off the pattern from the page is left on the plate.  After leaving it to dry, I put a thin layer of white acrylic paint and put a piece of wet strength tissue on and left it to dry over lunch.  This is the print and will be useful in collage.

Then I did the same but put blue paint as the first layer rather than black.  I also took headlines from Towpath Talk which is a newspaper and put them onto the gel plate.  After burnishing I pulled off the newspaper and the print is on the gel plate.  Again I put a thin layer of white acrylic paint and a piece of paper on and left to dry.

I had used a piece of leftover watercolour paper over the plate when I was smoothing the paper onto the plate for the blue pattern before I added the headlines.  This gave me this blue frame.  I used gel medium to pull the print of the pattern left on the plate.

I added more headlines to the gel plate.

I used transparent paint to pull the print.

I also tried putting some bondaweb through my printer.  After a couple of abortive attempts I set the printer to envelope.  I had taped the piece of bondaweb still on its backing sheet to a piece of thin card.  You can see at the bottom where I have pulled off some of the bondaweb.

I'm hoping to be able to iron bits of the printed bondaweb onto some silk noil which already has marks on it.

I'm planning on making the silk noil into a fabric book.  These are some of the pages.

If you're interested in playing with the gel plate I can thoroughly recommend Yeates Makes on YouTube.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

A Sketchbook from scratch

In Simply Create I have been showing folks how to make their own 15cm square sketchbook.  I started with nine A4 sheets of cartridge paper from Hilary Beattie’s £10 paperpack.  I used 3 sheets of 100gsm, 3 sheets of 140gsm and 3 sheets of 220gsm paper.

I found some painted papers and various music papers and text papers. I began by ripping up bits of the papers and gluing them onto one side of the 100gsm paper. I used gel medium underneath and on top of each piece.

I trimmed these sheets down to cut the random edges off.

I painted all the sheets of paper, whatever gsm weight they were. On some I used a sponge and others I used a sponge roller. I used acrylic paints to colour my papers.  I randomly stencilled on all the papers.

I cut along the long edge of the paper to reduce the width to 15 cms.  When folded this would make a 15 centimetre square book.

I set aside 3 of the folded papers to be the outside of each signature.  I cut different sized pieces off one end of each of the other 6 pieces. Using double-sided tape, I attached one of the cut pieces to another of the painted papers. Because I had used the same colour scheme on every piece of paper the new pieces match in some way the original but disrupt the flow of the page.

I made covers by cutting 2 pieces of cardboard just slightly bigger than the closed folded pages. I painted a thin line round the edge of the cardboard on both sides.  I stitched the signatures together - there were 3 folded papers in each signature and then assembled the sketchbook with the covers.

I decided to use Florida as a theme for my sketchbook. I collected together bits of papers, photos etc to do with this theme. 

These pages have images from paper napkins.

The collage is made from the inside of an envelope, a piece of scrapbooking paper and a word. The writing from the previous page shows through. I drew dotted lines with a black pen on the white stencilled shape. And sketched round the paper napkin shells with a black pen. I used a white Posca pen to put the dots in the orange swirls.

I hope you have enjoyed how I put this sketchbook together.  Full details of step by step instructions on how to do this are available at Simply Create.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice
 

Introducing Simply Create

 

I launched Simply Create on December 12th and I am thrilled that lots of you joined me in the Simply Create group on Facebook.

 

Simply Create is about the creative process.

It is not about creating works of art or even finished pieces of anything.   You will learn how to use art materials and tools in different ways which I hope will lead you to investigate your own ways of working, build your own creative language and find your own style.

Plus it is totally FREE

  Is Simply Create for you?

You can find all the information on this page.

If this is not for you but you know someone who would be interested, please pass on the link to this page.

Thank you to everyone who has continued to follow my blog through 2020.

Here's to 2021.

Thanks for joining me today.

Bernice

20 days in North America: Art Journaling Workshop

My last post about our trip to North America is a return to creativity.  We had organised the whole trip around me being able to take an inperson class with Valerie Sjodin.  I had signed up for her online courses but it is so great to be able to be in the same room as the tutor.

The workshop began on the Friday evening playing with paints and shaving cream.  First we looked at the paints we had taken with us.  Or in my case - had nipped into Blicks and bought on our arrival in Portland!  Lots of photos coming up.

Some of my painted papers.

Preparing the shaving foam and paint.

The scrapings from the shaving cream prints.

Over the next two days, Valerie showed us different techniques and we all worked at our own rate producing very different books.

Shaving cream prints

Stencilling

I sewed the pages of the book together.  I drew through a stencil on the cover.

I didn't like the green stencilled page so I stuck one of the sheets od Deli paper over it.

I really struggled with this centre page.  You will see what I ended up with later.

Valerie was available the whole time to encourage and to suggest ideas.  Many of her journals were on display so you could find ideas.  Here are the pages of my finished book.

I ended up cutting out circles from the very first paper we painted and then using a Michelle Ward stencil to doodle over the top.  It reminded me of the Chihuly glass we'd seen.

This is my favourite page.

And here's everyone's books opened at their favourite page.

Thank you Valerie and everyone else for such a great weekend.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice