My Candy, my intentions.

I have been working on the backgrounds of several pages for the My Candy class.  I was sure I had taken photos of the backgrounds for my two pages on photography but it seems I hadn't so it's straight into the finished page today here on my blog.

In a previous post I showed you my list of intentions for 2013.

 
I don't have any photo editing software other than the simple things available in Microsoft Office Picture Manager.  I don't get on at all with Picasa and don't have the patience to learn Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.  I did have a free piece of software from a magazine years ago which I used to produce the photo I have used for the stars on this page but I can't remember what it is called and I can't find it.  Most photographs that I put on here are straight from the camera.

Anyway, what I mean by Photo Manipulation in this instance is not the ability to distort something until it is totally unrecognisable like in these stars but to have photoediting that allows me to manipulate the mood or the angle of the photo.  I am considering buying Lightroom.

I had done some of the background for this page and I knew I wanted to either do stars or circles but couldn't decide how to arrange them.  Then I read the DT post on A Sprinkle of Imagination and borrowed a few of the ideas.  Thank you Trish and Vicki.

However when I had finished the stars didn't really stand out so I used Pan Pastel to highlight round the stars.

The second page is about Photo Inspiration.  When I was doing a course called Creative Sketchbooks and before that C&G Creative Embroidery I used photographs to inspire my art or my textile art.  And I've stopped doing that.  Although I still take the photos of texture or line.

So this year I want to use my photographs to inspire my art journal pages.  On this page I used a stencil I made whilst doing Creative Sketchbooks which was made from a photograph I took in the garden.

And here are the backgrounds for the next 2 pages on Challenge Blogs and Fitness.

Hopefully I'll finish these pages soon.

Thanks for spending time with me today.

Bernice

Week 3

This is week 3 for both Journal Candy and Lifebook 2013.

This week's class for Lifebook was from Christy Tomlinson.  I did her She has 3 hearts class with her so knew that we were in for collaging in a big way.   Firstly we had to collage and paint a background.

And then make flowers to stick onto the background.   I have made mine flatter than suggested because of being in a journal rather than on a separate peice of paper.

And a closeup

While the various stages of the Lifebook page was drying I also worked on this week's Journal Candy class.  This too was about collage.  But this time to make a small zine.  It's made from one sheet of A4 paper and ends up as a little book 10.5cms tall and 7.5cms wide.
Firstly the cover

And then the inside pages

And this is it folded.

I've really enjoyed myself today.  And I am so pleased that I completed two activities.  I probably need to go and have a lie down now!

See you soon,
Bernice

Finding my style

I often think about style and art journaling.  And  how to find my style.  There are people whose work I admire who have a very distinctive style.

Dina Wakley

Dyan Reavely

Roben-Marie Smith

Kate Crane

 

What I've noticed about these pieces of work is that they are all brightly coloured and busy. Full of pattern.  Dina and Roben-Marie frequently have areas of white on their pages but Dyan and Kate always paint every available space.

Some other work I'm drawn to is Mary Nasser.  Her work is all about maps.

And then there are the faces!  I don't do faces.  But I love the art that Rachelle Panagarry produces.

Oh and then there's text.  I just adore Valerie Sjodin's art journals.

And yet, when I look at all the art journal pages I have pinned on my Pinterest board I can see a theme there.  And it isn't brightly coloured and patterned.  Although those pages are there too.

There's pastels and neutrals.  Lots of white space.  Some minimalism.  Lots of duck egg blue. (Robin egg blue if you're from the U.S.)

When I'm reading Somerset Studio or the Stampington Art Journaling magazine my eye is drawn to anything neutral, duck egg blue, pastels, neutrals, peach colours.

And yet more often than not my work ends up dark and messy and patterned and not what I had in mind at all.  I am trying at the moment to only work with particular colours rather than randomly picking up what comes to hand.  I think Dyan's new White Linen ink is going to really help me.

I spend a lot of time on Pinterest and on websites looking at other people's work trying to find inspiration.  But I often end these sessions feeling despondent.  There are so many amazing people out there doing amazing artwork.  And so I hesitate to start.  It isn't that the blank page intimidates me.  I never get as far as opening the sketchbook or finding the paper some days. 

And yet this blindingly obvious comment stood out yesterday when I was reading Art Journaling.  A quote from graphic artist Promise Tangeman:

'Don't waste time looking for your style.  The truth is you already have it, 

you may just need to create more in order to see it.'

So that's what I should be doing.  Creating more. 

Have you found your style yet?