Author Archives: ajsartjournal

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About ajsartjournal

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

Why do birds sing?

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Hello friends!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and spent time with the people and doing the things they love the best.

We spent Christmas day with my parents and yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and went for a long walk along a beach.

My parents gave me a Love Links bracelet and two sets of beads for Christmas, it’s really lovely and something I will treasure always.  It was to replace the ring they gave me a couple of years ago.  I had that ring on my hand for a couple of months and then one day when I was working on the outside of the house it disappeared.  I was heartbroken about losing it and searched high and low but couldn’t find it.  Mum wanted to buy me a replacement ring but I thought the bracelet would be safer.

My husband gave me a Sizzix Big Shot (although he didn’t know that until I unwrapped it on Christmas morning, he just knew he had paid for a large box) and I’ve been busy embossing papers and cutting shapes when ever I’ve had a few spare minutes.

The spread above about the birds is not one of my most inspired but it happens to be the next page in the journal.  I’ve decided to share good and bad as it’s all part of the process.  This spread actually looks grubby to me and I have no idea where that dirty colour came from…

I am back to work tomorrow so I have to use today to catch up with a few outstanding projects.

You can see the gifts I made for my friends for Christmas on the Little Boxes and Things page.

See you all soon

Big love

AJ

Wake Up

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Hello Friends!

Today’s spread is my homage to coffee – I drink a lot of coffee (probably too much if the truth be told), I like it.  The background is fairly simple, just textured gesso ground, acrylic paint and a Tim Holtz reflections (numbers) stamp, some paper scraps and more gesso.  The small coffee related images are from a card kit I bought in a £1 shop, but as I don’t make cards I decided to use them in my journal, and the words are hand written.

Yesterday I went over to the mainland to meet up with the rest of my team for the first time and to have a Christmas lunch with them.  They are a good bunch of people and it was nice at last to be able to put faces to names after almost a year of being the isolated member of the team.  The lunch was good and we had fun getting to know each other.  AND I had time to pop into Hobbycraft on the way home (always a bonus).

Just two more days of work and then it’s Christmas, which means a four day break for me 🙂

I hope you are all doing well.

Big love

AJ

All wrapped up and Ready to Go

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Hello Friends

First of all I’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  May all your dreams come true 🙂  I’ve added a little festive snow to my blog.

With just a week to go all the hand made presents are finished and ready to be delivered.  I hope my friends enjoy them, I had fun making them, so I hope that will show through.

I can’t tell you what’s inside the parcels yet, but I will show you after Christmas.

Now I can relax a bit and stop panicing.  I will be at work all this week and on Wednesday I am going to meet the other members of my team for the first time (I work in a remote location) and we will be having a Christmas lunch.  That should be fun, I’ve spoken to a couple of them on the phone and they sounded nice.

The spread above is another from my 6×6 journal – textured gesso ground, torn pages from an old dictionary, vintage images of women, acrylic paint, stamping and hand drawn swirls and writing.  Afterwards I thought it probably would have been better to have printed the words as, like many people, when I try to write by hand it hardly ever comes out as I expect and this was a style I’d not tried before.  I wasn’t entirely happy with the results, but hey-ho that’s how things turn out sometimes and I do like the message.  My life has been extraordinary so far, I’m grateful for that and hoping for more extraordinariness in the future, for me and for you too.

Oh, I just noticed the date 18 December 2011! Today is the 41st anniversary of my first date with my soul mate and life companion. Wow, now isn’t that extraordinary!

See you soon.

Big love

AJ

Everyone…

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Hello Friends!

Sorry I haven’t time to write much today, I’m in my usual seasonal panic before Christmas.  I’m still trying to make the last of the presents and I’m struggling!  Why do I take on these ambitious projects?!  I am working on the last two and hope to get them done by the weekend.  I’ve made a couple of errors which have set me back a bit, but I’ve just had to work around them because I don’t have time to start from scratch now.

This is another spread from my small 6×6 journal – textured gesso, Inktense and acrylic paint, some scrap paper and more gesso and stamped and written words.

Before I go I’m going to recommend you check out Gretchen Miller’s blog Creativity in Motion she has a great post today about a Gratitude Scroll.  Gretchen ran my favourite workshop over at 21 Secrets where we made a Revo-lution book for ourselves.  Eventually I will get around to sharing that with you here, but in the meantime check out her blog, it has loads of wonderful creative ideas.

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Choosing to be happy

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Hello Friends!

I hope the Christmas preparations are all going well for you all.  I’ve almost ground to a halt, I only have a few things left to do, but my enthusiasm has waned and it will be a last minute rush again as it always is.

I am astonished that I had to get to the age of 56 before I realised how I feel is only partially influenced by external things and I can actually make a decision about the kind of day I will have.  So I am choosing to be happy.  Of course I won’t always be successful but I am going to give it my best shot.  Well they do say that practice makes perfect, so I am sure the more I practice being happy the easier it’s going to get.

Please don’t get me wrong I don’t have any big issues in my life that make me unhappy, it’s just that I can be a bit of a moaner at times and I am beginning to really appreciate that everything is so much better when I stay in the positive zone.

This is the second spread in my small 6×6 journal.  The background is textured gesso with some acrylic and Inktense on the top.  I used little scraps of paper and some scraps from old books, which had been die cut and sprayed with Adirondak colorwash spray in plum.  I wrote the words with my atyou spica lavender pen and edged the pages with Adirondak Bright Purple Twilight ink.

I just realised that two weeks today will be Christmas Day (I almost swore!)  Oops I’d better get a move on!

See you soon

Big love

AJ

Feeding my Soul

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Hello Friends!

I hope everyone is well, happy and prepared for the festive season.  I’ve got all my shopping done, most of the hand made gifts are completed so I just need to wrap things up.  I am always very resistant to putting up decorations but I usually relent a day or two  before Christmas because I do like all the coloured lights.

This a spread from my second journal.  It’s a small 6″ x 6″ sketch book with a wire binding.  I like the journal because it’s small enough to carry around with me and the wire binding makes it fairly sturdy and expandable.  However I am beginning to dislike the way the binding disects the spreads in two, so for the image above I have scanned both sides and stitched them together (in Photoshop) without the binding showing.

Most of the journals I have started so far have wire binding so I’m going to have to look around for something else to use in the future.  I do have a lot of board books so maybe i will start using them.  There are lots of options to choose from 🙂

So yes I do a little bit of art every day now and it’s doing me a power of good.  Using inspirational and motivational quotes is also helping me to focus my mind more on the positives so that’s good too.

Happy December 8th everyone

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

Completeness

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Hello Friends, I hope everyone is well.

So this is the final bit to show you of my first art journal – the cover.  I left the cover till last for two reasons, firstly so that I could carry the journal around with the plain cover so it would not attract too much attention (although it did start to intrigue people as it ‘fattened up’); and secondly because while I was working on the journal the cover got covered in paint and dirty marks and by leaving the decoration until the end it meant that I could make the finished journal look ‘pretty’.

One day a friend saw the journal on my desk at work and without asking grabbed it and started looking through it, it felt a bit like he had picked up my personal diary and started to read it.  I don’t think he was very impressed.  He said “Who’s done this?” and I replied “Me” to which he enquired “And how old were you when you did it?”

On front and back covers there is gesso, collage, stamping, acrylic and watercolour paints and distress inks.

On the Front cover I added a little bit of bling and a panel with the title ‘AJ’s Art Journal’.  I found some big cardboard floor dominos made for small children in a charity shop.  I actually liked the images that were on the dominos but I also found that I could peel the shiney cover off them, decorate them and for the cover title I used glossy accents to give it a shine.  I didn’t know how to make a closure so I sewed a flower bead on the front and back covers and used a bit of fibre to wrap around the beads and form the closure.  I also added fibres to the wire spine of the journal.

The panel on the back cover is something I found by the waste bin at work, it’s an identification plate for a pump, and I coloured it with stazon ink, put two brads through the screw holes and stuck the whole thing on with glossy accents.

I’ve shown this image before but this is the finished journal.  I really love it and I’ve had so much fun making, showing it and I’ve really appreciated the encouragement, lovely comments and the new friends I’ve made.

Creative people are just The Best!

That’s all for now, see you soon

Big love

AJ

The End and a Beginning

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Hello Friends!

These are the last pages in my first art journal, and as I managed to complete a whole journal without actually journaling anything I decided to write some words of my own on these pages.  Next time I’ll show you the cover which I left till last.

Hopefully my journaling on this spread will explain what it has meant to me to complete my journal.

Well I’ve just about finished sorting out my work room.  It still looks really cluttered and that’s because there is simply too much stuff in it, but at least there is now a semblance of order.  As I said before it probably won’t last long because I am naturally an untidy person, but it’s done me good to have a clear out.   The piles of ‘Things to Do’ will soon start to accumulate again.  I gave up with trying to shred the stack of old personal papers as my shredder kept jamming up every few minutes, so I went outside and burnt them in our ‘burning bin’.  My two cats were fascinated, I don’t think they have ever seen flames before, fortunately they had the sense to watch from a distance.

Today I am going to Osborne House with my local history group.  It’s our winter outing.  Osborne House is where Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their large family came to live on the Isle of Wight.  It’s a huge house in magnificent grounds and today it will be decorated for Christmas.  Because we are a history group we are having an educational trip (i.e. the admission fee is waived) and we will be having a guided tour and talk.  We will be giving a donation to English Heritage who are allowing us to visit today.  Afterwards we are all going back to a friend’s house for mince pies and tea.  It should be a good day.

Hope everyone is well and happy

See you soon

Big love

AJ

Love

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Hello Friends!

I hope everyone is well and being fabulously creative.

I have done very little art this weekend because I decided that it was way past the time that I should attack the mess and clutter that was my work room.  So far I have spent 6 hours on Friday, 6 hours on Saturday and 13 hours today and I’m still not finished!

Periodically my husband has peeked around the door to see how I’m getting on and has struggled to see any progress, at one point he said “It looks like there has been an explosion in here”.  But things had to get worse before they could get better.  I have slightly rearranged the room so that now I can get to the cupboards which were blocked in by boxes of history group stuff.  Lots of craft bits and pieces are now in labelled boxes and I found some really old jars of paint, probably over 12 years old.  Many of them had to be thrown away, even some that had never been opened, but I have put the ones that seem to be OK in my paint drawer and I will use them for backgrounds on my journal pages.  There is at least a car load of rubbish that I will have to take to the local tip next weekend and I reckon there is probably about another 6 hours worth of work before I’m finished.  I hope I manage to complete the job before I give up.  I have quite a lot of filing of personal and history group papers to do and I really hate filing so that’s going to be my weak point and where I am most likely to give in to the urge to make some art.

The sad thing is that my room won’t stay tidy for very long because I am an untidy person by nature.  Luckily my husband is obsessively and compulsively tidy so the rest of the house stays in order, but he doesn’t touch my room which seems to be a magnet for clutter of every kind.

Anyway here is a spread from my first journal that I did a few months ago.  It’s a bit different to my others: Gesso’d background, then acrylic paint and collaged papers, some old unused bandage, organza strips, I used some adhesive metal tape over the precut birdsong paper with a die cut frame from K & Co and some gold leaf.  The word love was a die cut from K & Co, I decided to spray it with Adirondak colorwash spray to darken it slightly, but the spray completely obliterated all the design and lettering so I had to redraw it with black and white ink.

It’s a bit of a weird one, but it was good learning process.

Take care everyone, see you soon

Big love

AJ

If you want to get ahead…

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Hello Friends!

I had the day off work today and I went to Chichester to do my Christmas shopping.  I left home at 7:30, drove to Fishbourne and got the ferry to Portsmouth then drove to Chichester arriving there at 9:30.  Chichester is a small city on the south coast, it has lots of interesting shops.  At first I didn’t think I was doing too well, I was doing lots of looking but not buying much.  Eventually I managed to get presents for most of the people on the list.  I also bought a few bits and pieces for myself: some trousers for work, some embellisments and charms from a £1 shop, and in a charity shop I found an A4 water colour pad for £2 and a large illustrated Victorian Songbook for £3 (it’s not actually Victorian that’s just what it’s about) it has some great illustrations that I will be able to use for my history group and also for my art.

I left Chichester at 1:30 and on the way back to Portsmouth I stopped off at Hobbycraft in Havant .  I always get excited when I go to Hobbycraft it’s a massive craft store and it’s so easy to spend lots of money there.

Before coming home I stopped off at a big shopping centre in Portsmouth and bought one last present.  Got the ferry back to the island at 4pm and was home at about 5pm.

My legs ache, my feet are sore and I’m shattered, but that’s the bulk of the Christmas presents out of the way, I just have a couple more to get then I can wrap everything and this year there should be no last minute panics.  I bought the present for my husband and also the present from him to me on the internet.  The present for him was delivered to my office at work and the present from him to me was delivered to home yesterday.  He has no idea what it is, so he says he is just going to wrap it up without opening it and at least that way one of us will be suprised on Christmas morning!

I had a long soak in the bath after I got home  then Tony served up delicious home made Leek & Potato soup and now I’m ready for bed.  I’ve got another day off work tomorrow so I might get time to do some art although I really should try and tidy up my room.

So anyway here is another grungy spread.  The images of the four lovely ladies in their hats is from the Graphics Fairy (thanks Karen), the other images may be as well (I’m sorry I can’t remember), the Graphics Fairy certainly is a wonderful source for the sorts of images I love.  For some reason the phrase ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’ always makes me smile, probably because it appeals to my sense of the ridiculous, and it seemed a perfect title to the spread.  The spread has textured gesso, acrylic paints, stamping, collaging and inktense watercolours to brighten it up.

That’s it folks, I’m off to bed, see you soon.

Big love

AJ