This blog is to share my adventures in art journaling. It's a journey of discovery and you are more than welcome to join me.
A little bit about me … I’m English and live on the Isle of Wight which is off the south coast of England. I am retired and I’m married to the love of my life. We have been together as a couple since 1970 but only got married in 2007. before that we were just getting to know each other 🙂
We have had an amazing life together, travelled to distant parts of the world and lived life to the full. Sometimes when we look back at our life together we say “Wow! did we really do all that stuff?!”
My husband has been very unwell for the past 10 years and I am his full time unpaid carer now. When he was younger he worked as an advocate supporting people who were detained in hospital under the Mental Health Act. He was also a musician and DJ. He is still interested in music and on good days our house is still filled with music.
Me, I’m much more of a visual person, I love photography and images and now, of course, I love art journalling and being creative.
We never had children, but we are now the proud parents to two beautiful cats called Bill & Jack (after Bill Burroughs and Jack Kerouac). They are getting old now and need more care and attention.
Want to know anything else? Just ask 🙂
Big love
AJ
Every Friday I attend a ‘Creative Carers’ group. It’s a chance for me to spend time with others in a similar situations (i.e. we are all carers for a loved one) and to be creative in some form.
A few weeks ago we attempted to decorate some small chests of drawers (14.5 x 16 x 7cm). I painted mine with primary colours but I messed it up by applying too much paint and at the end of the session I couldn’t even get the drawers back into the cabinet! At the end of each session we have to take whatever we have worked on back home because all the available cupboard space in the Carer’s centre is full of art supplies and there is no room for our finished, or incomplete projects. Usually I throw out my attempts when I get home. I really enjoy the company of the other people there and I enjoy trying all the different things we do, but I rarely produce anything I would want to keep.
So I took my set of small drawers home but before I threw them out I decided to at least get the drawers to fit. I sanded everything down and then waxed the inside of the box until the drawers slid into place.
I still wasn’t that happy with the finished result so I decided to draw a mandala design on the front and onto the top and side and then colour it in with lots of bright colours using my Posca paint pens and some gel glitter pens. When it was finished I was quite pleased with it so I gave it a coat of matt varnish.
In an attempt to get my mojo back I have started a new journal to fill with doodles.
Whenever I use any sort of paint I like to use up any that is left over from what I’m doing and I tend to use it in a blank journal, in this case a board book. This means I’m not confronted by a blank page.
This page started off with paint smeers on it and I added some collage doodles and marks.
In the years that I neglected this blog everything seems to have become a lot more sophisticated and I’m feeling a bit lost with the technology and terms used. I think I’ll just have to keep playing about until I ‘get it’.
Hello… Am I back? Who knows? Anyway, if you do happen to be here, then welcome (or possibly welcome back) to my blog.
Here are some Twirly Ball things I made recently from recycled book pages and broken jewellery (English spelling 🙂 )
This blog has been dormant for a long time and I am going to TRY and reactivate it. The truth is I haven’t been very creative since my last post (in August 2019) and I’ve missed it a lot.
My (spare room) “studio” turned into a dumping ground for all the stuff I didn’t know what to do with, there were precarious piles of stuff on every surface and all over the floor leaving just a small pathway from the door to my computer, there was still a high risk of an avalanche, so the pathway had to be nagivated with great care. Earlier this year I decided I had to do something about it and it has taken months to sort it all out. I’ve got rid of loads of stuff (don’t worry I still have more art supplies than I need), reorganised everything, sorted my art supplies into smaller and lighter boxes, and labelled everything. It seemed to take for ever but I finally got it done and my studio now feels spacious and airy (for now). Unfortunately I don’t have a good track record for keeping my space tidy, but I’m going to try!
A lot has happened in the past 6 years or so and TBH it’s been, and continues to be, really tough.
Here is a summary of some of the challenges I’ve faced:
We all had to deal with the Covid pandemic and lockdowns in 2020. Around about that time T’s health was in serious decline with multiple issues – he’s had 5 surgeries (2 of them redos of previous operations that went wrong)! and many hospital admissions. He developed cognitive problems that took well over a year to be sorted out with a change of medication. He’s still physically unwell but at least now we can have sensible conversations again. He currently has memory and mobility problems and is now in advanced heart failure. He’s been waiting for heart surgery and hopefully it will be done sometime in the next year, we are hoping it will be sooner rather than later because we were told it was urgent a year ago. My Dad’s health also declined and he had to go into care during the Covid lockdown he never returned home and passed away in Feb 2022. Mum and I were with him when he died. Mum has been lost without him and I really miss him too. They were married for 72 years. Because she knew I was dealing with a lot of issues too, she decided to move into a retirement home where she knew she would be looked after. That happened sometime in 2023 she is in a home that is close to where I live so I visit her whenever I can. I spent a lot of time last year sorting out and emptying her home so that it could be sold. She tried to help me at first but it was too upsetting for her going back to her old home. In the end I did most of it on my own. I spent hours in that house on my own crying, packing things to be taken to chatiry, sorting and cleaning, it was heartbreaking and exhausting! The house finally sold a year ago. I retired from work in August 2020 after working for the same company for almost 30 years. In all those years I had attended, and even organised some, retirement parties, they tended to be lovely events. However Covid regs meant my retirement party was restricted to just 6 of us meeting outside and having a picnic. Fortunately it was a lovely sunny day, the location was lovely (on top of a reservoir site) and the people I shared it with were some of the favourite people I worked with, but it still felt a little bit flat and disappointing. We both caught Covid in November 2023, ironically when we went to Southampton hospital for T to have a brain scan. I wasn’t too bad but was positive for 2 weeks, T was very poorly and had to go to hospital. He was discharged on Christmas Eve but he was still unwell and had to be readmitted on Boxing Day. It wasn’t a good Christmas! Then last year T spent about 5 weeks in hospital over Christmas waiting for Heart Surgery that (for various reasons) never happened. In May this year I had my 70th Birthday!!! I’m definitely beginning to feel a bit ‘creaky’ now but on the whole I think I’m in good health which is fortunate because I am now T’s main carer. I do get help – he employs a lovely lady C (who previously cared for my Dad and then my Mum) she comes for 10 hours a week. She is a fantastic carer, for both of us, and now she has become a close friend.
So with all that above (and more) going on in my life I haven’t really had the time or the inclination to be very creative. Recently I’ve begun to realise how much I miss it and have decided to try and re-establish some sort of creative routine. The ‘Studio’ is finally sorted out, organised and doesn’t feel so claustraphobic so I’m hoping to get back to being a ‘creative person’ again.
While I was tidying and reorganising the ‘studio’ I found loads of projects that I had started with enthusiasm but never finished. So I’m going to try and complete at least some of those before starting anything else? I don’t think I’ll ever have to buy any more art supplies for as long as I live (but in all honesty I probably will – it’s an addiction)! One thing I did finish recently was the Tikis and Totems Journal I started in 2015 as part of the Artstronaut’s Club run by Teesha and Tracy Moore. Here are the images from the completed journal: If you have followed my blog before you will have seen some of these images and if you follow me on Facebook you will probably have seen all of them recently. You can click on the arrows to see all 12 pages.
Front Cover
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Back Cover
I’ve upgraded my blog and now have my own domain name ajs-art-journal.com I’m not sure what difference that makes but you can find this blog by using that link or the old one (I think) AJsartjournal.wordpress.com. Actually I am struggling a bit at the moment, I’ve been away from this site for so long I’ve forgotten how to do lots of stuff. So if it all looks a crazy jumble I apologise, I think I will have to watch all the training tutorials again! But please let me know if when you view it things are not right and I’ll try to sort it out.
That’s all for now folks I hope to be back soon definitely sooner than 6 years next time.
I finally completed a whole project, it took a year but I’m chuffed with it. In July 2018 I was doing my regular trawl around all the local charity shops looking for a bargain when I found this book. I can’t tell you just how excited I was 🙂
It’s chunky book to help young children learn the alphabet, the pages are thick board covered in a plastic wipe clean surface.
First of all I carefully removed the cover and put it aside to reconstruct it later. Then I stripped all the plastic from the pages, it pealed off really easily and left me with a pristine blank book. To strip the pages gently start rubbing at one of the corners until the plastic begins to separate from the board page, then, if you are careful (and a bit lucky) you can usualy pull the whole plastic covering away from the backing.
Because blank pages are a bit scary I coloured every page with a random colour and then starting at A and finally finishing at Z I made my very own personalised ABC of Me. I used quotes and words that I find inspiring and to keep my spirits lifted. After I had removed the cover I was able to work on each spread flat, which made the job so much easier,
Once it was finished and because I still wanted to be able to open the book out flat I strengthened the spine with fabric and PVA glue, I also covered the front and back covers of the book with fabric and then stuck the first and last pages to the covers with more PVA glue. I made the titles for the front cover and the spine from an old piece of bandage which I coloured with ink and used alphabet rubber stamps for the lettering on the cover.
Here is the completed book, it took me a year to finish it: If you click on the Vimeo link you can watch it full screen, you will probably have to pause it if you want to read all the words. I have tried to attribute the quotes to the appropriate author, but didn’t manage with every one of them.
If you would like to create your own ABC book, the original My Big Alphabet Book is available from Amazon (and presumably other suppliers) at a reasonable price.
That’s all for now folks, take good care of yourselves and I’ll be back here sometime soonish I hope.
I hope you are keeping well and happy. I didn’t realise I’d been away so long again, I am struggling to get back into regular blogging. Also very little time for making art, which is a shame because the more I make art the easier it becomes and when I don’t do it I find it difficult to get back into my flow. But sometimes there are more important things to do in life and that’s OK.
So I thought I would share the image above with you, it’s a project I finished over a year ago. The picture is about A3 size and I made it as a house warming present for some young friends who had just bought their first home.
The project started when I bought a children’s book about dinosaurs:
It’s a lovely book with great illustrations and and a wonderful colour pallette.
First I created a background.
Then I added a collage border and focal point using bits cut out from the dinosaur book.
Next I added shading using Inktense water colour pencils.
Then outlined everything with black ink.
Using paint pens I altered all the collaged elements. Although I use elements cut from books I use them as inspiration but I always want to make them my own with my own mark making.
Finally I added the beautiful Apache Blessing and some swirly bits and put it in a frame. I hope they like it, they said they did, but people are very polite and to be honest I wasn’t entirely sure about it. I do love the colours of this piece though and and the Apache blessing. “Walk gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life”.
It’s summer and the weather is hot, I LOVE it! The garden is thriving, it takes a lot of watering which is time consuming but worth the effort. Whenever I can I use water from the water butts and when they are emtpy the plants get a splash of tap water, just enough to keep them going until the next rain.
Our cats are as gorgeous as ever and I am happy to have them in my life.
Jack in his castle, it’s an ornate tomb in the cemetery, but he’s claimed it as his own.Bill just wants his tummy tickled 🙂
I am TRYING to blog more regularly, but at the moment failing spectacularly, I’ll try harder!
I am trying to stay off politics because the situation in the UK (and the world) is driving me crazy. It really does feel like the lunatics have taken over the asylum. I could easily slip into full raging rant mode, but I won’t.
I’ll be back when I can and in the meantime take good care of yourselves.
I have had no time or inclination to make any of my own art recently. T has still been very unwell, it all got pretty bumpy on this roller-coaster ride. The highs have been very brief and the lows deep, dark and long-lasting. He seems to be a lot calmer just now and more stable, I’m holding my breath in case another massive wave of depression comes crashing in.
It’s all been very worrying and stressful but you just have to keep going don’t you? Fortunately I get a lot of support from my colleagues at work even though I know there are times when I am not functioning at full capacity. I am so grateful for the understanding and the leeway they give me during these difficult times.
So I gave myself a treat
Earlier this week I gave myself a much needed treat and some ‘me’ time. My favourite artist, David Shillinglaw, has a new art installation in London at Morgan, 1 Dallington Street, Clerkenwell. It opened on Tuesday 9th April with the private view party 6pm to 9pm. Because I live so far from London I couldn’t attend the party but David told me I could go earlier in the day.
I left home at 10am and travelled by train, ferry and train to London arriving at Waterloo Station at about 1pm. Then I started walking along the south bank of the River Thames. It was drizzly and damp but not too cold. I walked to London Bridge and then crossed over the Thames, I went through Pudding Lane where there is a monument to the Great Fire of London and then on into the East End.
I really like the East End of London, it’s very diverse, a bit shabby and ‘lived-in’, and I saw lots of street art, some of it good some of it not so good, but here is a selection
Most of these photos were taken around the Brick Lane area. From Brick Lane I walked to Old Street and at 4pm I had to stop for a coffee and a short rest as my legs were aching from 3 hours of walking. I got to Morgan at about 4:30pm. David hadn’t yet arrived, the place was busy with people making preparations for the opening party but they still let me in and even made me a cup of tea.
Morgan is a design furniture show room and every year they commission an artist to showcase their art along with the furniture. This is the second time David Shillinglaw has installed his art at the venue. Other artists featured have been Remi Rough, Expanded Eye and Mark McClure. You can find out more about Morgan here: https://www.morganfurniture.co.uk/blog/
While I was waiting for David to arrive I had plenty of time to admire the art, it’s very impressive. It’s called Alive in the Human Hive. The wall (which took three days to paint) is so colourful and fascinating it just lifts the spirits. It looks good in the photos, but really you should see it up close, the colours really zing! One of the things I love about this art is the repetative symbols, it all looks very simple but for me it’s deep and meaningful, a universal language that touches my heart. On the wall there are some new works on canvas too. I think the installation will be there for several months so if you are the Clerkenwell area pop in and have a look.
Lily Mixe and David Shillinglaw
David and Lily arrived at about 5:10pm and I had to leave at 5:30 but they spent the last 20 minutes chatting with me which was lovely. David is as sweet as I remember him from the first time I met him in 2015 and it was lovely to meet his partner Lily who is also a very talented artist. They are a lovely couple. In a way it’s good that I had to leave before the party started because I am such an introvert I would probably have felt out of place and awkward. But I’m sure it would have been a great success. As it was I got to see the artwork by myself for half and hour and then had a lovely chat with the artist.
After I left Morgan I got the tube back to Waterloo just in time for my train to Portsmouth and I got home just after 9pm. It was a really good day: I enjoyed my own company, walked more than I’ve done in a long time, enjoyed the street art and different views, then to finish it off I met David and Lily and soaked up the happy vibes coming from that amazing wall. Couldn’t ask for more. I was exhausted and I slept well that night.
One day normal service will be resumed in my art practice and on my blog, just not sure when that will be, please bear with me…
I hope all is good with you and life is treating you kindly.
So here is another page from my Landscapes Journal, might be a landscape of the microscopic, who knows? Certainly not me.
Not that happy with the end result of this page, but I enjoyed the process of making marks on the page and that’s what counts.
This is the original page before I did anything with it:
So this is another lost weekend in our house, it just seems relentless at the moment, the waves of the Bipolar sea just keep crashing in with little time for recovery before the next one comes. There is nothing I can do but try and be supportive and try not to take things personally (which is harder than you would imagine) and keep busy until he’s ready to come back from that deep, dark place.
Yesterday I found out where the leak is in my van so hopefully I can get it sorted out now. After that T (who seemed to be OK at the time) asked me if I could prune a shrub in the garden and bag up the waste. We didn’t have any empty bags so I took a car load of full bags to the tip and when I got home about an hour later I pruned the shrub while T went for a nap. He did get up briefly after that but I could tell the black cloud had descended upon him and he soon went back to bed where he has mostly remained. He gets up occassionally but he’s not looking good and doesn’t really want to converse so I guess it’s good that he is spending as much time as possible asleep.
Today I have done housework and washing, the sun is really bright today but it’s very windy and a bit cold, fortunately so far the garden fence panels are still in place but I hope the wind dies down soon. I really don’t want to have to replace them again!
In a while I will go and see Mum and Dad to see if they are OK, They are both still struggling since they returned from their respite care in the nursing home after their accidents. Mum no longer has to wear the neck brace, but her lower back gives her constant pain. She is managing to get out of the house a bit. Dad seems to have a constant chest infection and he is hardly leaving the house at all, he seems a bit depressed to me which isn’t really surprising as his world has shrunk considerably over the past year. Hopefully he will cheer up when I visit.
That’s all for now folks, take good care of yourselves and I’ll see you soon.
Sorry I went AWOL again last week. T was really unwell and I wasn’t in the mood to be sociable, did a lot of cleaning and though, so it wasn’t all bad 🙂
I made a zine, I’ve always loved zines and I’ve collected a few over the years but I never made one myself until now. It is just 4 sheets of A4 paper folded in half which gives 16 pages in total including the cover.
The contents of the zine are just some of my doodling so don’t be expecting any great artwork 🙂
Actually I made it sometime last year, but I couldn’t think of a title for it and also I lost confidence in it so it never got printed then last week I found it again, thought it looked OK and decided to call it Cosmic Chaos. I have given it the number 1 as I may produce more in the future. As you can see I printed a few copies so if you think you might like one please let me know and I’ll post it to you. You will have to give me your name and address and the best way to do that is to send me an email to subagua(at)gmail(dot)com, but you will have to leave me a message either on here on on facebook to let me know as I rarely use that gmail account, it’s the one I use when people insist on me giving them an email address (like when I purchase something online or sign a petition) and then continue to bombard me with messages I really don’t want. So it’s normally just a dumping ground for unwanted emails. I have a different email address for my normal emails but I don’t want to post that address on the internet.
I am still working on that page in my landscapes journal that was on my work desk when I last posted, but progress is slow. I think that might be because I’m not really ‘feeling’ it but I will persevere.
Here is a young British artist I discovered today, I like Bolaji’s art and I love his philosophy of playing and having fun – let’s go with the flow and see what happens 🙂 Very impressed with the studio too!
That’s all for today folks, I hope you are keeping well and happy and I’ll see you again soon.
I have no art to post this week as both T and I have been feeling unwell for a few days and there has been other stuff to do. So here is a photo of a corner of my messy studio with another page of my Landscapes Journal, in progress, on my table. This time it’s just a single page, not a spread, and to be honest I have no idea where it’s going, currently it’s just one almighty mess, but I’ll keep at it until something decides to show itself to me.
The stack of books on the right are some of the journals that are currently also in progress. Some of them were started years ago. Occasionally I pick them up and and if I get inspired I restart and do some more pages, but I think that some of them will never get completed. However in the back ground (if you look very carefully amongst the mess) you can see some of the journals I have completed. In total there are 26 that have been completed and another 12 or so that are in progress and many more that have not even been started. Then there are the little note/sketch books I carry around in my bag to doodle in whenever I get a spare few minutes.
I just love working in books, either books that I alter or books I make. What I like about them is they are very personal, private and easily transportable. They are also the one thing that has kept me practicing art. Throughout my life I have attempted all sorts of art, but I am so lacking in confidence I never progressed or really found my ‘thing’ until I discovered art journaling. The first two journals I created I didn’t show to anyone, not even T until they were finished. With journals the whole always seems to be than the sum of the parts, if you know what I mean 🙂
Next week I hope to have something new to show you
Here is another spread from my Landscapes journal. This is all about Island Life. I have always lived on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England.
The Isle of Wight is sort of diamond shape and is approx 23 miles from East to West and 13 miles North to South. It has a population of approx 140,000. There are several towns, many villages, lots of open countryside and miles and miles of beaches.
Although I have travelled extensively and I have worked off the Island for periods of time, it has always been my home and I love living here. By coincidence all of my favourite holidays have been on Islands. We loved the Island of Tobago so much we visited three times and we even got married there on our second visit.
Here are the original pages before I painted over them:
The quote: “There is something about the ocean that never fails to amaze me, the way she never fails to kiss the shores even though she is sent away. The way her waves can be both calm and terrifying and the way she never fails to soothe my soul” is by Tilicia Haridat.
I messed up a bit with the writing on the second page where for some reason I decided to make it fit between the lines rather than just sitting on them
I have a need to be near the sea, and I am comforted by that edge of land and sea defining and enclosing the space where I live. I love walking on beaches, drawing in the sand, and collecting pebbles, shells, driftwood and bits of flotsum and jetsum that wash up on the shores. Where ever I am on this Island I am never more than half an hour away from a beach These days I always try to pick up and remove the bits of plastic I find washed up on the shores too. Sadly there is always some to pick up.
AJ's Art Journaling 