Category Archives: Journal 3 A4

The Soul should always stand ajar…

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Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience

 

Hello friends

Here is another quick post of a spread I did in my A4 journal back in June.

Today is the last day of the 4 day exhibition about the history of Ryde at St Thomas Heritage Centre.  The weather has been fantastic and we have had lots of visitors and lots on lovely comments in our guestbook.  Today we have ‘Meet the Residents’ at 12:30 (a dramatic portrayal of some of the people from Ryde’s past by members of the group) and I am giving a presentation about Union Street at 2pm.  This will be followed by the draw of our fund raising raffle.  Then at 4pm we start to pack it all up and transport all the material back to various locations.  We are all going to be exhausted after this!  We have had a fantastic time and all the effort has been worthwhile.  If you are interested you can find out more about it here.

I will be happy to have some time to do some art next week!

See you all soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Create Everyday

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Create Everyday

Hello friends

I just have time to quickly post this spread from my A4 journal which I did back in June.  The Create Everyday page is on the back of a page where I used Fimo Light to create texture and as a result is very warped and distorted, but I don’t mind that 🙂

In a few hours time my local history group opens the doors on a 4 day exhibition at St Thomas Heritage Centre for Heritage Open Days.  On Saturday we walked into an  almost empty building and since then we have cleaned it, transported a whole exhibition, set it up and decorated the building.  It looks great and now we can relax and have four days of fun!

I hope you all have a great weekend and I’ll see you when Heritage Open Days is over.

Big love

AJ 🙂

Success

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Success

Hello friends

I hope you are all well and happy.

I’m not so good today and have taken a day’s sick leave from work.  I had two long days on Tuesday and Wednesday.  On Tuesday I went for my interview, still not really understanding what I was being interviewed for.  I think it went OK but won’t find out for a couple of weeks what they have decided to do with me.  Yesterday I had to attend two meetings on the mainland and didn’t get home until 8pm.  I was struggling to stay optimistic and cheerful yesterday, but I think now that was because, although I didn’t know it, I was already unwell.

Today I didn’t get up until about 3pm and I’m still not feeling good, but you can’t lay in bed all day can you?

This page is from my A4 journal and is opposite the one I posted last time, the colours match but they are not really what I would call a spread and were done months apart.  On this page I used Fimo light on parts of the page and pressed a load of trinkets and keys into it while it was still wet.  I made the page quite warped but I don’t mind that.  I used blue, orange, black and gold acrylic paints; stamping and scrap book paper.  I hope you like it.

I’ll be back soon, hopefully feeling better and in a lighter frame of mind.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Sunshine light your day

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Sunshine Light Your Day

Hello friends

I hope your week is going well.  Mine is very strange, there is quite a lot of tension and concern at work, it’s becoming a slight struggle but I’m still being positive.  I am just having to give myself more and more pep talks.

I’m a day late with this post!  How did that happen?  I think it’s because  I went to an Osteopath for some treatment yesterday so my routine was not as usual.  I guess that’s where I got mixed up.

This spread is another painting I did for Connie Hozvicka’s Flow workshop on 21 Secrets.  It’s a great workshop where you just paint by intuition, from the heart and not from the head, quite liberating 🙂  I started by just enjoying the combination of the colours for the background, it began to feel like sunrise so I painted the funny flowers at the bottom in the foreground and then I added the quote.  Well it makes me smile 🙂

Be inspired be creative.

I’ll be back soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

Flow

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Flow

Hello friends

It’s a sunny Sunday and we are just off out for an afternoon in the sunshine at the V-Dub Island, a small festival a few miles from where we live.  T is DJing there this afternoon at 4pm.  We went along last night to have a look and really nice, only a few thousand people there on a tiny site with three main areas for entertainment – the main marquee where bands play, a similar sized one which is a cafe and where smaller bands play, and  smaller marquee where my husband will be playing his tunes for an hour.  It had a really good and friendly atmosphere there last night, very friendly.

Yesterday I laid the laminate flooring in our new (tiny) extension, so gradually things are coming together in there, just a bit of painting to do, a few tiles to replace on the floor where the kitchen joins the new bit, the builders have to come back and put in the skirting board and then, finally, we will be able to use our new dining room.

The spread above is in my A4 journal and was an exercise I did for Connie Hozvicka’s Flow workshop on 21 Secrets.  It’s a really great workshop.

When I first did the painting it looked like this, and was done with guache paints, I loved the colours:

Flow before

But after I had lived with it for a while I knew it needed something else so I added the more organic shapes with acrylic paint and the cool quote about going with the flow.

Sorry!  I’ve got to go, T’s says we will be late if we don’t leave now!  I haven’t checked for Typos so forgive me if there are any.

21 Secrets is still running to the end of the year and is on sale now.  If you are interested check it our here, there are some fantastic teachers and workshops there.

Ha, ha, ha!

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Disorderly

Hello friends

It’s Wednesday and it’s still sunny, so I think we are now enjoying summer, I hope it lasts a few weeks at least.  It is so lovely, warm and bright.

You are probably wondering why I have posted my image upside down, but in fact it is the right way up, it’s just the quote that is the wrong way up.  I really liked this background.  It started off as a page in my journal where I cleaned off rubber stamps and stencils so it had lots of random words, letters and shapes on it.  I collaged some vintage foreign ripped book pages, scraps of paper and some papers I had used to protect my work surface when spraying onto another spread.  I added some colour with Inktense blocks on it  and edged the pages with black watersoluable oil pastels.  I really liked seeing all the layers so I thought I would just add a quote.  I found this great quote attributed to A A Milne and I liked it because I am a very disorderly person.  My OCD husband simply does not understand how I can work in my room surrounded by so much clutter and mess 😉  I used a new set of alphabet stamps I purchased and happily started stamping out the quote, I was pleased when I finished the first page, but I had just started the second page when I noticed the stitch I used to hold the feathers in place on my Follow Your Dreams page, then I realised that all the words were upside down!  Well it was too late to do anything about it so I carried on.  So should anyone look through my journal they will come to a page that looks like this.  I guess that’s a happy accident.

At work we are undergoing yet another restructure in the function I work for so lots of things will change soon.  I don’t know what’s going to happen with my job, but I have seen the new structure and my team does not appear on it.  I do know that at the end of it I will still have a job but at the moment I just don’t know what it will be.  The last time they did this to me I nearly cracked up, they put me in a role that I was totally unsuited for and still expected me to do all the duties in my old role, even though they said that role didn’t exist any more!  Tomorrow I have to go to a meeting where I may find out a bit more.  I am a bit more chilled out these days so I will just wait and see what they say.  Lots of people throughout the whole company are worried for their jobs and I don’t think this is going to much for staff morale, we’ll see.

Anyway I hope you like my ‘upside down’ spread.

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

When someone shows you who they are…

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When someone shows you who they areHello friends

Wow Wednesday already, can’t believe how fast this week is passing, but I had two days off work and managed to get loads done, even a bit of decorating.

This spread is from my A4 journal and it was done as ‘art therapy’ a few months ago.  I was angry and upset and rather than dwell on it I put it down on these pages.

I won’t go into the details because honestly it’s not worth it.  It’s about someone who used to be a friend but isn’t anymore.  The quote by Maya Angelou, is so appropriate because if I think back, even when we were friends she showed me her true colours several times, but because we were friends I made allowances.  I should have believed her the first time she showed me the nasty side of her personality and ended the friendship then.  It’s been a valuable lesson to learn.

The page was created after a particularly unpleasent event a couple of years after the friendship ended.  She made accusations about me doing something I hadn’t done to several other people.  It felt like I was being provoked to respond in an angry way and defend myself, but I decided to ignore her and work through my frustrations by making art.  I wrote down exactly what I was thinking and then covered it up with art.  It worked 🙂

I didn’t like the spread at first, but now it’s growing on me.

I thoroughly recommend this – Don’t get angry, get arty!

I hope you are all having a good week.

Big love

AJ 🙂

Let your imagination soar!

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Let your imagination soar

Hello friends!

It’s Sunday evening and it’s sunny – woo hoo!  It’s so nice to see some sunshine at last.

It’s been a crazy week here.  There is a big music festival going on, with lots of famous bands and Bruce Springsteen headlining tonight.   There are somewhere between 65,000 and 90,000 people attending (it’s difficult to get a definite/accurate number).  Anyway the place where I work is slap bang in the middle of what becomes the festival campsite and every year we get several weeks of disruption in the build up, during and after the festival.  For some reason I am the person who deals with all the problems and sorts it all out, which I have to admit is fairly interesting although not always successful.

This year is the 11th year of the festival and it seems to get bigger every year.  For the first 9 years they had sunshine everytime but last year it rained on the last day and as a result the whole site turned into a mud bath.  This year we have had really bad weather for weeks and the site was already thick with mud even before the gates opened on Thursday morning.  My 20 minute drive to work on Thursday took about 2 hours and most of the time I wasn’t moving at all, just sat in a long line of traffic.  Fortunately I left early because things just got steadily worse throughout the day.

When they opened the festival car park fields on Thursday morning the first cars in sunk into the mud and after that every single car had to be towed in by tractor, which took much longer than if they had been able to drive in.  All the time more ferries were arriving with more cars and eventually the tailback from the festival entrance went back as far as the ferry terminal which meant they were unable to unload any more cars.  Some people were trapped on the ferries for about 4 hours, others were unable to get on the ferries until the next day and many people had to sleep in their cars overnight.  When eventually they did get to the site, it was a mud bath.

I really feel sorry for all these people, the tickets for the festival are expensive and the tickets for the ferries are also expensive, so many people invested a lot of money in the weekend.  Everyone accepts that this is England and the weather is unpredictable, so come prepared for rain and mud, but the poor planning in dealing with the huge influx of people onto muddy fields on Thursday and Friday, has left a lot of people angry.  I could not get to work on Friday because all the roads around the site were gridlocked.  Eventually things did get better, the police and organisers found other places for people to park and bussed them into the site, but it was not a good start to the weekend.

We have had rain on and off all weekend and a heavy downpour most of last night.   I am really glad that now, for the last bit of the festival the sun has come out and hopefully warmed everyone’s spirits, they deserve it.

I am on leave tomorrow and Tuesday and at a meeting on the mainland on Wednesday, but I know that when I get back to my office on Thursday I will be greeted with a sight of devastation and mud  where just a couple of weeks ago there were green fields.

I don’t go to big festivals any more, I sometimes go to smaller ones and I was lucky enough to go to see Jimi Hendrix play at the early and massive Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 when I was just 15 years old.  They reckon that 600,000 people attended that festival, amazing!

Anyway, enough about all that stuff.  This spread is from my A4 journal and it came about because I bought the Tim Holtz Birdcage die.  I was so excited that I die cut a whole book (I believe it was an Enid Blyton Famous Five book).  Then I wondered what on earth I could do with so many birdcages so started to stick them down on my journal pages and from there the idea came about freeing myself from the doubts and self-limiting beliefs that sometimes (often) enter my head.

I like how it turned out.

Have a good week

Big love

AJ 🙂

Be Strong Live your Life

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Live your Life be Strong

Hello friends

I hope your week is going well, mine has been a bit chaotic and it feels like Friday when it’s still only the middle of the week, I’m tired…

The spread above is from my A4 journal.  The pages already had some Adirondak Colorwash spray on them and I collaged torn book pages over the top, more Colorwash spray, acrylic paint and gesso.  Some torn 1950s wallpaper with geometric design, and the girl is from an exercise I did for last year’s 21 Secrets.  Through Tamara Laporte’s workshop I learnt that if you are not very good at painting faces (and I’m not) you can paint over an image of a face cut from a magazine or printed on your computer, by doing that you will get all the proportions right.  I loved this half face image of a girl in a turban so I printed it out and painted over it.  I think I need a lot more practice, but it looks more realistic than any other face I’ve tried to paint so I’m quite pleased with the result.  To me she has an arabic look, so I looked for some arabic text to put on my pages.  The text I found says something like Be Strong, Live your Life.  I printed it out in reverse and tried to transfer it to the page with gel medium it wasn’t very successful and is something else I need more practice with, but I think you should just be able to see some of the text :-).  Finally I printed the words in English big and bold.

The quote is appropriate for me right now because I’m struggling with a couple of things at work at the moment.  I know I need to stay strong and positive despite there being so much negativity all around me and the temptation to just get angry and give up.  I have to keep giving myself little pep talks to make sure I stay on course, it’s a challenge!

Wow!  I just realised that today is Summer Solstice, from now on the hours of daylight start shortening again.  People call it Midsummer’s Day but it’s not really that – often there is more warmer weather after the Solstice than there was before, I hope that’s true this year, because we haven’t had much of a summer so far.

Enjoy the rest of your week everyone and I’ll be back soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Sometimes you just have to go with it!

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Doing your best!Hello friends!

It’s another wet weekend in the UK!  Oh well don’t have to feel guilty about staying in all day doing art 🙂

This page almost didn’t make it to the blog, because I’m really not that happy with it.  I was tempted to just paint over it with gesso and start again, but I spent so much time getting it to this sorry state it probably deserves to be just as it is.  I always try to do the best I can, but I’m not a perfectionist, I reckon if that’s the best I can do at this time then I should be satisfied.  It’s a bit of a struggle with this page because it’s ugly, but I hope it might grow on me.

There are so many layers I couldn’t even begin to tell you the whole process, but the page includes textured gesso, acrylic paint, stamping, acrylic ink, lots of torn paper (of course),tissue paper, holographic paper and rub on lacey bits.  I bought some small letter dies to cut the letters from holographic paper for the quote.  The dies were cheap, and unfortunately they don’t really work in the Big Shot, so I had to improvise and add layers of card until eventually the letters punched out.  The words ‘Best’ and ‘Moment’ are stamped with some vintage letter stamps that were being thrown out at work, there is not a full alphabet but I didn’t realise until I tried to find the N so I had to use Z on its side!  I stamped with Perfect Medium and used black embossing powder.

Because of the way the light from the scanner reflects on the holographic paper you may not be able to read the quote, it says: Doing your Best in this moment, puts you in the best place for the next MOMENT.

That’s all for now, hope you are all enjoying your weekend, next time I will post something that I think is prettier.

Big love

AJ 🙂