Zig Zag book pt 1

Do you remember the papers I painted last week?  Well here's what I've done with them so far.

I started of with a 6 inch square zig zag book which I bought from Art Van Go.  It's made from 100% recycled cotton rag and you get 5 of them in the pack for £3.50   You can see more about the paper here.

I worked out what size I wanted to work and drew a recatangle on each page.

I cut up some of the painted paper to the same size and tried it out on the pages.

I cut up the painted paers in different ways and glued them to the book pages.

I couldn't decide whether to show you each page as it developed or as in the way I worked.  I chose the latter.  I worked on each page and then took a photo.

Originally I was going to work on the small pieces of paper and use my sewing machine but I'm not very practised with that sort of work so I decided to do faux stitching instead.

These pages are finished - for now!  I'm going to leave them for a while and then come back to them to see if I should add anything else.

And of course, there's the other side to do yet.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

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