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

Writing in the Round

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Hello Friends

I hope everyone is well.  I am feeling much better and only had one day off work.  My husband is now poorly but not with the same thing.  He’s had a few days off work and has suffered much more than I did.  Hopefully we will both be back on track again soon.

The spread above is from my 6×6 (handbag size) journal.  I still don’t feel comfortable writing in my journals so I thought I would practice my lettering. I painted gesso in a spiral on the pages so that some parts were left without gesso and then I used Inktense block over the top to create the background.

I drew the ‘true love’ flowers in the middle and then started to write – from the inside out on the first page and the outside in on the second page.  I coloured the petals of the flowers with glitter pen so they sparkle, and drew the wobbly border all around – et voila!

Not much else to say really and I need to get on with my scanning of old photographs.   So far I’ve scanned and cleaned up 11 photos, only about another 100 to go!

Hope you all are having fun

Big love

AJ

Revo-lution 2012 – Kindness

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KindnessHello friends!

I hope everyone is well and happy.  I must admit I’m a bit under the weather at the moment and have spent most of today in bed.  It will pass I just need to rest up for a couple of days, so I probably won’t go to work tomorrow.

The spread above is from my 5″ x 5″ Revo-lution 2012 board book inspired by a workshop I did on 21 Secrets last year with Gretchen Miller.  Gretchen has information and an e-book all about the Revolution available on her blog here.

This image reflects my desire to become a kinder person.  I really like the way it came out.  I painted the pages with a pink fluorscent paint I found in my stash when I tidied up my work room recently.

The paint must be nearly 20 years old because I remember I originally used it to paint on big fabric hangings that were used to decorate walls at clubs and parties where my husband DJ’d.  When the hangings were lit with UV/black light the colours really glowed.  Anyway despite its age most of the paint is still useable so I’ve moved it into my paint storage drawers for easy access.

Also on this spread I transferred text from a book directly onto the page using gel medium.  Thanks to Donna Downey for the tip on how to do that, it’s really easy and the results are amazing, although I must admit you can’t see them too well in the picture.  I stamped over with my tiny flower and tiny dots stamps.  The hands are cut from a magazine, the letters are from a word game I bought in a charity shop and are stuck on over a piece of scrap paper.  The hearts were cut with my new BigShot 🙂 and I stuck the three words onto pre-made tags from K & Co which were attached with a decorative brad.

That’s all for now folks, I’ve exhausted myself and need to go and lie down again for a while.

See you later

Big Love

AJ 🙂

Doodles Unleashed – Playful Printmaking

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Hello friends!

Strathmore has some fantastic free online workshops at the moment and I decided to sign up for the wonderful Traci Bautista‘s Doodles Unleashed.

If I was a more disciplined person I wouldn’t have done this because there are other things I really should be doing right now, however, I am a hopeless addict to creativity and I couldn’t resist!  I watched both video turorials for week 1 Playful Printmaking and then created the above image.  It is in a big (12 x 16 inch) Daler Rowney 300 g/m water colour pad.

I was a bit out of my comfort zone creating this page, but I am happy with the way it turned out.  I had to laugh because my husband came into the room while I was working on it, he rarely comments on my art, but he looked at this page and said “Hmmm, that’s very psychedelic”!!  He didn’t say whether he liked it or now though?

Right, let’s see if I can get this report written before I’m tempted to start the second workshop Spontaneous Water Colour Backgrounds, it’s going to be tough so wish me luck 😉

Big love

AJ

Revo-lution 2012 – Change

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Hello Friends

I hope everyone is well and enjoying the new year.

First of all I apologise because I have not been replying to comments on my blog, which I think is very rude and I hope you will forgive me.  My only excuse is that things have been very busy.

My dad went into hospital on Friday for what the doctor described as a minor operation.  It was to remove a lump about the size of a tennis ball from the side of his face and neck.  We already knew that the lump was benign but it was beginning to affect his swallow.  There were some risks in him having the op.  Dad is nearly 90.  The doctor assured us that if all went well he would stay in hospital one night and then come home the next day.

The op was done in a hospital in Portsmouth, just a few miles from where we live but with a stretch of water and a ferry crossing between.  Mum wanted to be on the same side of the water as dad, so on Friday we all set off together and mum and I booked into a hotel overnight.  We left him at the hospital at about 1pm and the next time we saw him was at 5pm.  He was sitting up in bed, looking pretty OK.  He has a three inch cut in his neck with 12 stitches, which does look quite dramatic, but the big lump is gone!  Everything went well and he was allowed to come home yesterday.  He is just feeling slightly sore but is suffering no after affects from the general anaesthetic.

I think mum and I were more exhasuted than he was by the time we got home.  I checked on them both today and everything is still fine.   Phew!

Apart from that I’ve had to update the history group website and prepare a presentation for next Saturday, now I have a quarterly report to write before next weekend and then there is a stack of about 100 historic photographs that someone lent to me a couple of months ago that I really must scan so I can return the originals.

Still I’ve managed to do a little art and this is the second spread in my 2012 Revo-lution book which is about the changes I want to make in myself for my intention of becoming a better person.

That’s all for now.

Big love

AJ

366 Challenge

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Hello Friends

I have decided to have a go at Kate Crane’s 366 Challenge this year.  Here is my January spread.  The idea is to create a calendar page for each month and then doodle or journal on each square for each day and at the end of the month post the completed page along with a new one for the following month.  The quote says

“A new year is unfolding like a blossom with petals tightly concealing the beauty within”.

I hope everyone is well.

Big love

AJ

New Year’s Revolution!

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Hello Friends

Happy New Year to one and all!

I’m not making New Year’s Resolutions any more, because to be honest they usually seem to be about giving up things and I rarely keep those kinds of promises.  So this year I am trying something new.

One of the workshops I did at 21 Secrets 2011 (now sadly ended) was Gretchen Miller’s Revo-lution workshop.  It’s all about exploring concepts of transformation, creating change and new possibilities through art.  You concentrate on key words that have meaning for you and you make a journal page to show that meaning visually.  You can find out much more about this process at Gretchen’s blog Creativity in Motion.  It’s a great thing to do and I highly recommend it.  I do believe it can be life-changing for the better.

I made one Revolution book during 21 Secrets which concentrated on Joy, Bravery, Harmony, Creativity, Confidence, Authenticity and Serenity and now I am making a new book for 2012.  The first page is about Inspiration – I want to be inspired and I’d like to inspire others.  The book is a 5″ by 5″ board book stripped back to the board and then gesso’d and I’ve used images that inspire me.  The couple on the left are my parents who have loved and inspired me all my life; the sunset at Castara bay in Sunny Tobago (one of my favourite places on earth); a bit of an old map of Ryde, the town where I live, it has a fascinating history; Albert Einstein – who was a genius, deep thinker and often a little playful, I would have loved to have met him; Images of work of Joan Miro and Keith Haring, two of my favourite artists.  The little image bottom right says Plant a Seed, because that’s what inspiration is – the potential for something great.  I’ve included ArchBishop Desmond Tutu because he is another highly intellegent man, deep thinker, has a heart the size of a planet and a ‘wicked’ laugh.  I would love to meet him.

My good news is that I am now signed up for 21 Secrets 2012 so this year I will be participating for the whole 9 months, (big smile).

I hope all your dreams come true in 2012.  Here’s to another art full year.

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 🙂