1: Cultivating a Culture of Honour

Today is the first of eight sessions from the Bible Study in 1 Corinthians called A Culture of Honour.    On this blog I shall be posting about my creative response to each session.   Session 1 is called Cultivating a Culture of Honour.

I love the writing that Mary Brack and Hope Wallace Karney do in their journals but becasue I don't give time to practising such things I can't do that style.  However what I did do was go to dafont where I found some free handwriting fonts.  Using Publisher (you can use whatever Desktop Publishing package you have) I put the verse into the font and then arranged it in different sizes on the page.  I made sure the text box I was working would fit my journal page.   I printed out the verse and then shaded over the back heavily with a 3B pencil.

I turned the paper over and traced over the words with a pen which left a pale pencil impression and then went over that with two thicknesses of pen.

These are the pages with just the thin gesso layer on.

I chose some acrylic paints to keep to a colour scheme although in the end I didn't use all of them.

I bought myself some cosmetic sponges from the 99p shop to apply the paint and also used a damp wet wipe.  The paint wipes off the gesso if you use a wet wet wipe.

I chose 2 6x6" stencils to use although the bottom one didn't work well so I worked mostly with the top one.

I added some sage green over the pages and some blackberry through the stencil.  You can see where I tried unsuccessfully putting pale blue acrylic through the second stencil.

I chose a couple of stamps and the Peacock Feathers Distress Ink and randomly stamped onto my pages.  I didn't put the stamp onto a block.  I held it in my hand and pressed part of the stamp onto the paper.

I found a small butterfly stamp and used Archival Ink to stamp with.  However it was a bit too wet.  I listed those values that are important to me.

I hope you feel you can join in with the study.  If it's not your thing then I hope that my showing how I make my pages helps you with your art journaling.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Make It Personal playtime

As you know I have been attending a course taught by Hilary Beattie.  I blogged about the last session here.

When I was listening in to Hilary's one-on-one chats with some of the other students I had a lightbulb moment.  Other students have chosen a particular image for their inspiration which is more easily incorporated into their designs and I realised that this was where my difficulty lay.  My source of inspiration is a fountain in King's Cross, Sydney.

I have associated this in my mind with Agapanthus but when I got home I looked online to be able to send a link to Hilary and discovered that actually the fountain is described as a  dandelion fountain.

I have lots of dandelion photos so sorted out a few of those.

I went for a short walk and picked some small dandelion leaves and pressed them for a couple of days.  Today I used then with  my gelli plate.  I used blue, green and white fabric acrylic paint, a bought stencil and a bought dandelion stamp.

As you can see the colours are much more muted than when I work at The Bramble Patch.

I have some ideas percolating around my head for these.  But that's enough photos for today.

Thanks for stopping by.

Bernice

Make It Personal 4

Make It Personal is a whole year course.  We meet up with Hilary Beattie for two days every other month.  We started in January and continued in March and May.

We spent Thursday working with recycled items.  This is a page in my sketchbook where I stuck down torn up bits of music, book pages, a brown paper bag and some map paper.  Then I put a thin layer of gesso over it.  When I was over-dyeing another paper I blotted it off on the this page.  I love the random blue.

Here I stencilled over wrapping paper with acrylic paint.

This is the drip cloth from underneath my work.

And this is a whole old map stencilled and dyed.

On Friday Hilary encouraged us to put out all the papers we have made over the previous sessions.  I didn't think I'd got that much until we laid it out on the tables.

There were some very obvious colour schemes going on and a set of papers that you just have to wonder what was going on in my head at the time.  Mostly the ones that had an over emphasis on lime green!

It was very hot over the two days and when I got home on Friday and emptied my car the dining room/craft area looked like this:

You can see why I need help decluttering.

Yesterday I sorted all those papers into piles by colour and ended up with this.  Just need to find some way to store them.

The next session in September is on design using these papers.  I'm really looking forward to it.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice