Tag Archives: collage

What’s the problem?

Posted on by
2

What's the problem?

Hello friends

Here we are mid-week and everything is just about back to normal, just a few things still to catch up with, but I’m getting there 🙂

This page is my second illustration for Dr Amy Johnson’s book Being Human. The section is about problem solving and it was a revelation to me.  You know how sometimes things are really obvious but you just can’t see them until someone points them out to you? Amy wrote about how many of our ‘problems’ are just the result of how we think about certain conditions and if we think about them in a different way they might not be problems at all. Wow!  But you will have to buy the book (when it goes on sale) to find out more 🙂

I really loved using my own photographs to make up the collage elements of this page. There are images from my garden, a holiday to Barcelona and from the town’s carnival. Then lots of pen work and great quote by Amy. I hope you like it.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your week and I’ll see you again soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

 

 

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013, unless otherwise stated. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Look Without Yesterday’s Filter

Posted on by
2

Without Yesterday's Filter

Hello friends

I am back after a really busy and successful week and all is good here, I hope things are great with you too.

So we transported our big exhibition to the old church and set it up and decorated the church to make it look as good as we could and opened to the public on Friday and Saturday.  It’s been a great success with lots of lovely feedback and some new people joining our group which is great.

Today we took everything down and transported it all back to where it belongs. The whole week has been a lot of hard work and good team effort and has definitely been worth it.

Tomorrow I go back to work and it will be good to be getting back to normal. I am hoping that now, having met both urgent deadlines, things will quieten down a little in my life, after a week of not making any art I am in urgent need of some art therapy. 🙂

As promised in my last post the page above is the first page I did to illustrate Dr Amy Johnson‘s new book Being Human (due out in in November). The chapter for this illustration is called Showing Up Dumb and it’s about how we often react to a situation with preconceived ideas, judgements and opinions, that is we let things that have happened in the past affect what happens today, but if we show up with a clear and open mind we truly and naturally react in the moment.

Have a great week everyone

Big love

AJ 🙂

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013, unless otherwise stated. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Getting there :-)

Posted on by
2

Being Human

Hello friends!

I hope life is treating you well, I am fine.  One deadline achieved and the second one will be achieved by Friday of this week 🙂

So my first deadline, which I achieved a few days ago, was my secret project. Now it’s time to start telling you about what I’ve been working on and the image above is a little sample for you.

Early in July I was contacted by Dr Amy Johnson a psychologist and life coach from America who asked me if I would illustrate her second book.  Her first book is called Modern Enlightenment. After checking out Amy’s website I soon realised that I loved the things she wrote and decided to follow up her enquiry.  As soon as I spoke to Amy I knew I had met a genuine and authentic person and I agreed to do the artwork for her new book Being Human.  It will be available to buy before Christmas this year 🙂

I can’t tell you how honoured and excited I am to be a small part of this wonderful book.  In order to illustrate the quotes I have read several extracts from the book and it has been a fantastic journey for me.  To make sure we were both safe with regard to copyright issues I decided not to use magazine images for the collage elements and I used mainly my own photographs, some photographs of Amy’s family and a couple of images that are in the public domain.

Prior to this my artistic process had been to make the art and then find a quote to compliment it.  But for the book I had to start with the quotes Amy provided and then make my artwork fit them. It’s been a challenge and a huge amount of fun.

Amy is very wise and writes in a way that is easy to understand and take on board.  The whole experience has improved the quality of my life and Amy has been a joy to work with.

If you like my art I am sure that you will love Amy’s book Being Human and I will tell you when it is available for purchase in a few weeks time.  Personally I can’t wait to read the whole book 🙂

Obviously the artwork I produced now belongs to Amy but she has given me permission to share it with you.  Above are small sections from the 8 pages I produced and in the coming weeks I will be sharing the whole pages with you.

I am so grateful to Amy (and to the Tiny Buddha website –  it was on that website that Amy first saw my work) for this wonderful opportunity.

So my next deadline is less than a week away.  Next Friday my local history group, Ryde Social Heritage Group, opens a two day exhibition of local history in a big, old abandoned church in the town.  On Saturday we spent the whole day cleaning it, and on Sunday we started to transport and set everything up.  There is still lots to do and I am beginning to feel slightly pressured, but I have the whole of the week off work and by Friday morning we will be ready for a wonderful two day event event!

I will probably miss my mid-week post again on Wednesday due to preparation for the event but I will be back next weekend 🙂

My life is really, really good right now and I truly hope yours is too.

Big love

AJ 🙂

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013, unless otherwise stated. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Deadlines!!!

Posted on by
Reply

Stand out!

Hello friends

I hope you are all well and happy.

I am doing fine and I’ve had a mainly enjoyable weekend.  I am hard up against two deadlines now that have to be delivered in less than two weeks.  I am confident that I am going to meet both deadlines as long as I stay focused and calm.  I did have a bit of a wake-up call today though.  I woke up at 7am and was feeling distinctly unwell so I decided to stay in bed for a while.  At 8am I woke up again and still felt bad so I decided to get up, I generally feel better once I am up and about.  I got myself a cold drink and took some painkillers for a pounding headache and decided to do some art.  Art is always good therapy.  But within about 20 minutes I realised that I was going to be sick and just made it to the bathroom in time.  Being sick made my head thump even more so I went back to bed.  I was sick one more time and then managed to get back to sleep.  When I woke up I thought it was probably about 10am and was shocked to see it was already 1pm, but fortunately I was feeling considerably better.

I got up and tentatively did some art just to make sure I was really feeling OK, then I had a shower and got dressed.  I thought that probably the best thing I could do was go out for a walk and get some fresh air, so I combined visiting my parents with taking Mum out for a stroll (Dad decided to stay at home at watch football).  Mum and I went to the park had a short walk then stopped and had a cup of tea in one of the cafes, another short walk and stopped for ice-cream before I took her home again.  It was a really lovely afternoon.

When I got home I suddenly realised that I needed to update the RSHG website, something I do at the beginning of each month.  Doing those updates took me up to dinner time, and now, updating the blog is probably going to take me up to bedtime.  Despite sleeping the whole morning away I’m sure I will need to go to bed at my normal time tonight (between 10-11pm).

Losing the whole morning today made me realise just how easy it would be to miss the deadlines and how I just have to keep working away at them steadily making progress all the time.  Also how fortunate that I didn’t lose a whole day or more due to sickness.  So if I miss my usual mid-week post on Wednesday it’s because I am still plodding away and making good progress.

I am really conscious that people leave comments on my blog and I am very bad at getting back to them or at answering questions.  I really do appreciate everyone who is kind enough to leave comments here, so THANK YOU everyone.  A few people have also asked recently if they can buy copies of my artwork.  I must admit it has come as a huge and pleasant surprise to me that anyone would want to, but I am afraid at the moment you can’t buy my art.  I will be looking into it after my two projects are successfully completed and you will definitely be able to purchase some of my artwork towards the end of the year, although maybe not in the format you were expecting.

The page above is page 4 of my 5th Teesha Moore inspired journal.  I have no idea who to attribute the quote to.

Have a good week everyone and I’ll see you soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Best laid plans…

Posted on by
1

Gratitude

 

Hello friends

Sorry I am out of synch with my posting again and this is also a day later than my usual midweek post, I’ll try and get back to normal soon.

OK I have to confess the plan to tidy up the art room (again) was a massive fail (again).  

When I woke up on Monday (bank holiday) it was a beautiful sunny day so decided to do something outside instead.  I find it fairly easy to find something better than tidying up my art room.

I am not really a gardener, in fact I’m not a gardener at all, but I do things like cutting the grass (occasionally), hard landscaping, building things and occassionally helping T out.

First thing on Monday morning I drove T to the local garden centre to purchase some tomato food and while we were there I noticed a lot of cyclamen plants in flower.  I said “I thought cyclamen were winter flowering plants”.   T replied, “Well ours are, or at least they were, I think you removed them all when you tidied up the woodland area of the garden recently”   Ooops!  I thought that was just dead stuff I was clearing up, he commented that it had only taken him 17 years to cultivate that patch.  I felt really bad, but he was philosophical about it and said “Well they might grow back, despite your best efforts to remove everything”!

He had previously mentioned to me that two branches of a  big Bay tree in the cemetery that were overhanging our garden, had begun to interfere with the television reception.  I hardly ever watch television so I was not aware of this.  T can’t go up ladders a) because of his dodgy leg and b) because of his vertigo so I got the ladders out, climbed up and sawed through the two branches, which (fortunately) fell onto the hedge between our garden and the cemetery.  T helped me drag them from the top of the hedge into the cemetery and then we cut them up and put the pieces into bags.

I put the bags into my ‘new’ car and drove to the local tip to dispose of the rubbish.

All of the above took up most of the day and I had just sat down, outside, on the decking to work on my art journal when T got a phone call.  I can’t go into details but he had to get to an urgent meeting in the next town in 15 minutes.  The trip normally takes 20 minutes but somehow I managed to get him there on time and then I had to hang around for a couple of hours until the meeting finished.   I didn’t really mind as I knew T was doing good work but it meant that there was no tidying of the art room and no art journaling either.

The page above is page 3 of my 5th Teesha Moore inspired journal and on this piece I was practising a different type of lettering.

That’s all for now folks, I’ve got to get on, my two deadlines are approaching fast and both at the same time and although things are going well I need to ‘keep at it’

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

 

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Abundance

Posted on by
2

Abundance

 

Hello friends

I hope all is good with you, everything is well here.

It’s a bank holiday weekend in the UK which means no work tomorrow – Hurray!

I have been trying to de-clutter my life, with varying degrees of success.  Yesterday I took three sacks of clothes to one of the local charity shops, so now I can open and close the drawers in my bedroom and find things easier in my wardrobe.  Hopefully I won’t miss anything I threw away, but it felt good to do it.

Before I went to the charity shop I went out and exchanged my old car (plus some money) for a newer one.  This car is so different to my old one, which I had for years, it is going to take a bit of getting used to, but I am happy that I made the change.

Yesterday afternoon I worked with my friends from the history group sorting out our next exhibition.  We have put in such a lot of work on this exhibition I think it is going to be fantastic.  There is still more work to do before the exhibition opens on 13 September, but we are definitely making good progress.  If you are interested you can read about it here.

Today I have tried again to tidy up my art room, this is much harder than getting rid of clothes because everything in my art room is useful, interesting and distracting (and there is so much stuff in my room) I have made some progress.  Still lots more to do though!  I also took my parents out for a drive in my ‘new’ car and I cut the grass and tidied up a small area of the garden.  So it has been a fairly good day, the weather has been good too, it looked like it was going to rain, but that held off and now, even after dark, it is still and warm outside and I can hear the sounds of a firework display going on somewhere in the town.

And the bonus is I have all day tomorrow to continue with the tidying and hopefully will also have time for some art.

The page above is the second page from my fifth Teesha Moore inspired journal, I really like this page – the collage and the colours and a great quote by Oprah “The greatest thing you can do to change your life today is to start being grateful for what you have right now. The more grateful you are the more you get.  You have everything you need”.  I am grateful, my life is good.

Have a great week

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Dream

Posted on by
2

Dream

 

Hello friends

I hope you have had a good weekend and are ready for the week ahead. I’ve had a weekend on my projects, on Saturday I worked with some friends from the history group preparing for our next exhibition in September.  Today I got up early and took my car to the local hand car wash.  I’ve never been there before, normally I take my car to the drive through machine but today I wanted the inside cleaned too.  Well I can’t trade it in if it’s not clean inside can I? In 20 minutes my car was cleaned inside and out by a team of friendly young men, hard-working young men, and it was cheap too.

I spent the rest of the day working on challenge on my other project.  Although I can’t tell you about it yet I can tell you that it is making me create my art in different way.  I’m still doing collage and pen-work, but I am using a different source for my collage materials and I am having to work in a sort of ‘back to front’ process.  It’s a bit like working out a puzzle and I am loving the results.

The page above is the front cover of my 5th Teesha Moore inspired journal, which, as you can see, I made in April of this year, just before I did my first ever art journalling workshop.

Have a great week and I’ll see you soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Happiness and Troublesome Cats

Posted on by
6

Happiness...Hello friends!

Since I posted on Wednesday about being so busy and not having enough time to fulfil the obligations of winning blog awards I have decided that from now on this blog will be ‘Award Free’.  I am so grateful to Tess for the nomination last week, but I just know I am not going to complete my side of the deal and I feel bad about that.  So in order to prevent this happening again I’ve put an ‘Award Free’ button on my home page, before any else thinks of nominating me for another award.  Of course that may never actually happen, so this is just in case…

If I was going to nominate other blogs for any awards it would be those listed in the side bar of my home page and I recommend that you take a little time to visit those blogs and see the amazing art work produced.  Especially that produced by Teesha Moore and her lovely husband Tracy.

OK so that’s out of the way now and hopefully I won’t have to worry about it again 🙂

Cats are strange creatures aren’t they?  We have two cats, brothers, Jack and Bill.  They don’t like each other much and they are very different characters.  Their favourite food is cucumber and green beans!  They are both really sweet in their own way and they both ‘talk’ a lot.  Jack Kat is more T’s cat than mine, he is very smart and always seems to be a tad tetchy (probably because he has to share the house with Bill).  Billy Kat seems to be ‘my boy’, he’s a bit of a dope to be honest and when he is inside the house he is sweetness personified and usually sleeps on the bed with me.  Outside he is a mean, lean and deadly hunter and is very territorial.  The other day he trotted back home with a large rat in his mouth.  Fortunately it was dead and T was around to deal with it, I’m a bit squeamish about things like that.

On Saturday morning I decided not to get up early for a change.  T  let ‘the boys’ out at about 5am and then came back to bed.  I was woken at 7am by the sound of screeching and caterwauling coming from outside.  I recognised immediately is was ‘my boy’ so I got up and rushed downstairs and out on the decking and called “Billy, Billy, Billy”.  He soon trotted through the hedge into the garden, but would not come to me, he just sat underneath the decking looking ‘sheepish’ (if that’s possible for a cat).

About an hour later I found him sitting outside the back door on the step and when I let him in he was hobbling and holding his left front paw up in the air.  Apart from that he didn’t seem too distressed so I waited until T got up a while later and then I held Bill while T examined his foot – nothing was broken and all his claws were still there.  A few weeks ago Bill came home with a sore and swollen paw and we had to take him to the vets.  That time he had ripped a claw out and the vet gave him antibiotics and some pain killer/anti-inflammatory medicine – it cost a fortune!  As there seemed to be no obvious injury this time we decided to give him some of the pain killer (fortunately we had some left over), keep him in and under observation with the idea of taking him to vets tomorrow if necessary.  I don’t know what is in that medicine but he was ‘stoned’, pain free and more sleepy than usual all day yesterday.  Today he looks like he has a slight hangover but he’s not limping any more and his foot hasn’t swollen.

While he was recuperating yesterday Jack Kat came in from the garden, went up and had a close look at Bill to make sure he was OK and then smacked him on the side of his head as if to say “That’s for being so stupid!”.

I am sure you are not the least bit interested in the antics of ‘my boys’, so I apologise for that..  but here they are anyway 🙂

Bengal Boys 1

                    Bill                               “The Bengal Boys”                                 Jack

The page above is the back cover of Journal No 4 inspired by Teesha Moore.  I am trying really hard to live each moment with love, grace and gratitude, but I think I have a lot more practising to do before I really get there,  still at least I’m trying 🙂

Have a great week everyone.

Big love

AJ 🙂

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

You are a divine being…

Posted on by
2

You are a divine being

 

Hello friends!

It’s mid week and it’s muggy, we have had a little bit of rain, but really what we need is a fantastic electric storm to clear the air and then more sunshine.   Well that’s what I’d like anyway.  My head has been feeling fuzzy for the past couple of days and I am sure it has something to do with air pressure and atmospherics.

So this week I have been working on my secret project and I’m having LOTS of fun.  One day I will show you the results 🙂  I’ve also been researching and writing up display sheets for the history group about the town’s photographers from the mid 1800s, which is very interesting and I’m still doing the boring day job 🙂

Researching the photographers made me think that I really need to try and get back into photography again, I have two digital cameras which I use often and they are OK.  The good thing about digital is that you can take lots of photos and just delete the ones you don’t like and there are no processing costs, but, to me, there is something almost lifeless about the digital photos.

My BIG love is using film and my lovely Lomography LCA camera, it’s the perfect camera for me.  I love the way it sits in the palm of my hand and I love the way it vignettes the images.  The problem with analogue photography though is that it’s getting harder and more expensive to get the film developed these days.  My favourite process is to use slide film and get it developed as normal negative film.  This process (known as cross-processing) messes with the colours in a way that gives fantastic results.  Different films give different results.  Unfortunately many of the companies that are still developing film react in horror when I ask them to process the film with the ‘wrong’ chemicals and those that agree to do it charge a ridiculous, and unnecessary, premium for doing so.

Here is an example of a cross-processed image, so you can see what I mean about the colours – super saturated.

Waltzer

The page above is another from my fourth Teesha Moore inspired journal and the quote is from the late, great Terrence McKenna.  If you don’t know who T McKenna was then you are clearly not of my generation, or if you are around the same age as me but you still don’t know who he was, then your life took a completely different path to mine. 😉

Have a good week and I’ll see you soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 

 

A Moment of Calm

Posted on by
Reply

A Moment of Calm

 

Hello friends

I hope you had a good weekend, mine has been fine – a little bit of gardening, a little bit of housework, some history research, some art, some good food, some time with my parents, catching up with emails, but I still made no progress with tidying up my room, it just never seems to get tidy and I never completely catch up with everything on my ‘to do’ list.  Perhaps that’s the whole point, there always has to be ‘something else’ to do just to keep the forward momentum.

So anyway, there is lots going on in my life and it’s all good and I’m happy.  I hope things are good for you too.

The page above is another Teesha Moore inspired page and I was practising with different lettering. It’s not as ‘busy’ as my usual pages but I am pleased with it nevertheless.

Right, it’s late here and I’m off to bed.

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

COPYRIGHT

© Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Janette Gregson and ajsartjournal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.