Tag Archives: collage

Abundance

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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

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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

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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…

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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

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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.

Scattering Stars like Dust – Rumi

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Scattering Stars like Dust - Rumi

Hello friends!

It’s still tropical here on the sunny Isle of Wight and I’m loving it, even though I am not getting much of an opportunity to get out in it, it is just lovely to be able to walk outside and sit in the garden with my morning cup of coffee and we have been eating our evening meal out on the decking for a couple of weeks now.

I was at work for 4 days this last week and it was VERY warm in my office.  Almost every other office in the building has air con but my little cupboard doesn’t so I have been having the big window wide open all day with a dark cloth (actually it’s a sarong) hanging over it to keep the sunlight out and I have a fan switched on full all day.  It’s still slightly uncomfortable but I’m not complaining because I would rather put up with a little discomfort than have to share a cool office with all those noisy people 🙂

My mum went into hospital for day surgery on Thursday and is now back home, she seems fine but is a little tired.

Last Friday and tomorrow (Monday) I have taken leave from work.  On Friday I made an attempt to tidy up my art room, I wasn’t entirely successful, but it is slightly better than it was (my OCD husband may not agree with that statement, but it looks tidier to me).

On Saturday my French nephew, A, who has just finished his Engineering degree at Imperial College London and started a new, 2 year, design course at the Royal College of Art, came to visit my parents (his grandparents) which was lovely.  It is always a joy to have him visit.  On Saturday evening T was DJing at a small festival, the Rhythm Tree Festival, on the Island and he managed to get an extra ticket for my nephew so we took him along with us.  It was a SMALL festival, probably less than 3000 people there, so it wasn’t too crowded and had a good mix of ages and a very friendly atmosphere.  We saw a good reggae band when we arrived and then just had to wait an hour until T did his ‘world dance music’ set, which my nephew thought was ‘Amazing!  We all had a great time and my ancient knees have been aching today from all the dancing.   We met loads of the people we used to go partying with 20 years and more ago.  We are all much older and slower, but apparently not much wiser these days 😉

The page above is another from my fourth Teesha Moore inspired journal and I really like this page.  The quote is by Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.

I am looking forward to another day off work tomorrow and I’m hoping to get at least a few things ticked off my ‘To Do’ list.

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.

The Universe Says…

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The Universe says...

 

Hello friends

I hope all is cool with you.  We are having a tropical heatwave!  This weather reminds me so much of Sunny Tobago (which is probably my favourite place in the world).  Oh how I’d love to be “Limin’ wid de locals at Castara Village” right now.  In case you don’t know “Limin'” is the national past time on Tobago and it means hanging out and chatting. Tobagians are the friendliest people I’ve met they are so chilled, even though the temperature rarely drops below 20 degrees C.

Gosh what a busy week I’ve had!

On Tuesday I went up to London with three friends from Ryde Social Heritage Group to attend the annual conference of Community Archives & Heritage Group at University College London on Wednesday.  We had a great couple of days and the conference gave us the opportunity to meet with other local historians and professional archivists.  I even felt relaxed and happy giving my 10 minute presentation about the RSHG.  A big part of the conference was the presentation of awards and Ryde Social Heritage Group received an award for “Most Inspirational Community Archive”. We are so happy and proud that our little local group has been given this national award.

We didn’t get back from London until late on Wednesday night and then it was back to work for me on Thursday and Friday.  No-one does my work while I’m away so I had to try and cram in 4 days worth of work into 2 days.  I was only partially successful but as I made a decision a while ago that I was not going to allow work to stress me out at going home time on Friday I just switched off (computer and work head) and came home.

On Friday evening I had to prepare a presentation to give at Ryde Social Heritage Group’s quarterly meeting.

On Saturday we had the quarterly meeting and it was my pleasure to report to the members that we had received a national award for being Inspirational.  After the business of the meeting we had a fascinating talk by a guest speaker on Life in Roman Britain. Afterwards most of the committee went out for lunch but I had other things to do so couldn’t join them.  I hear they had a great time though.

Also this week I have started work on an exciting project which I won’t be able to tell you about until after the summer.  It is going to be fun and rewarding for me though :-)

The page above is another from my fourth Teesha inspired journal.  I don’t really like the lettering on this page, but I do like the colours and the words.

I hope you all have a great week.

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.

 

Deepest Depths

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Deepest DepthsHello friends

I couldn’t post anything yesterday because I couldn’t connect to the internet, not sure why, just one of those things that happens now and then.  T was getting very anxious about not being able to get on line, but I just did some art instead 🙂

I hope things are good for you where-ever you are.  Here all is fine, my chronic hayfever is much better, I’m no longer sneezing all the time and my eyes have stopped streaming, my head does feel quite congested though and I can only breathe easily though my left nostril, but that’s OK at least I am still breathing 🙂

The Arts Festival is going well, on Tuesday I went to an Open Mic Poetry evening at the library which was fun.  I’ve never written any poetry so I was only a spectator, but a lot of the poetry was very good and it was an enjoyable evening.   Yesterday Lucia Para was giving demonstrations at the Depozitory on how she creates her lovely art and in the evening there was an Accoustic Originals event at St Thomas but I had to miss both of those – due to work, shopping and trying to sort out internet problems..

Tomorrow I am sitting at the Depozitory all day, minding the Never Ending Story exhibition,  hopefully I will get some visitors and in any case it will give the chance to do some collaging 🙂  I have taken the day off work so that I could sit at the exhibition all day.

Yesterday I had an amazing email and potentially something very exciting will come from it.  I don’t think I can talk about it just yet, but it feels good and it feels like the Universe is being extra kind to me at the moment.

The spread above is a page from a journal I started working in during the Mermaid Circus workshop back in April this year.   I didn’t really achieve as much as I’d hoped during the workshop but the tutorials by Jane Davenport and Teesha Moore were wonderful.  For me it was well worth the cost just to spend some online time with Teesha, she is such an inspiration for me.

That’s all for now folks have a great week

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

 

 

Build Your Wings

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Build Your Wings

 

Hello friends

I hope all is good with you, I am very well and happy.  We had a proper summery day today and it lightened my mood.

I really like this page from my journal, in fact I have a copy of it on my office wall at work. It’s there to remind me that if I don’t like my job I can actually leave, I can take a leap. When my boss saw it he liked it too and I gave him a copy.

So I am back at work this week and it’s just the same old stuff, but at least I have my own nice little office now and I can listen to Radio 4 all day.

I’ve got to give a speech at a conference in London in a few weeks time about Ryde Social Heritage Group.  I’ve got to get that written before this weekend!   I’ve just about written the words, no doubt they will be ‘tweaked’ a few times before I’m entirely happy, but now I’m working on the images to go with it, I thought if I had images on a screen then people wouldn’t have to look at me all the time, and the images will show the work of the group better than anything I can say.  But I need to send the images to the conference organisers soon just to make sure they are compatible with their software and equipment.

Ryde Arts Festival starts next weekend and I’ve still got a few things to sort out for that. Tomorrow is the last of my workshops at The Foyer making the Matchbox Momentos and I think we will just have enough to fill the display case for the exhibition.  I’ve been trying to think of other things I can do with the group.  Of course I would like to teach them about Art Journaling, but I don’t think they are ready for that at the moment.  I’ll talk to them about it tomorrow.  One idea I have is making jewellery from rolled paper beads, I wonder what they will think of that?  I am going to have to take a break before I work at the Foyer again, I think I need to have the whole of July off just to try and catch up with things I’ve been neglecting and maybe I will work with them again in September.  That is if they want me to.

I have finished making the Art Journal book from the pages created at my workshop in April and I’ve been trying to make an e-book, unfortunately that wasn’t as easy as I had anticipated (either that or I’m an idiot – not sure which). So now I’ve decided to make a movie of the images instead.  If I am successful I will post it on the blog so you can see the great work the class did.  Once the Arts Festival is over I will take the book apart and return all the pages to the people who created them.

I have to collect up all the Family History Shrines made by Ryde Social Heritage Group last week and deliver them, and some sort of heading, to the exhibition space by the middle of next week.  Gosh it’s all go here!!!

Right, that’s all for now, I’m tired and off to bed.  

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Another Teesha Inspired Journal

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Another Teesha Inspired journal :-)

Hello friends, I’m back – I think.

I have my new computer and, as we all predicted, at first it caused more problems than it solved, but gradually it is getting sorted out and at least this one is not crashing all the time and eventually I will sort out all the glitches, it all just takes time which is something I seem to be a bit short of.

Today I did a workshop with some of my colleagues from Ryde Social Heritage Group and we made Family History Shrines based on a free ebook I found on Aisling.net here is the link if you are interested: http://www.aisling.net/freebies/family-hist-shrine.pdf

I got together with 8 friends who have all researched their family histories and I showed them how I create my mixed media backgrounds using acrylic paints, stamping, stencilling etc. and everyone created lovely 3-fold books.  Unfortunately we ran out of time but at least they left with lovely backgrounds and now they will be working at home to put details of their families into the books.  I completed my book a few months ago and then I showed it to my friends and asked if they would like to make books about their families too.  I was delighted when they all said yes and we had a great day today.  At the end of the month our work will go on display in an exhibition called The Unfolding Story for Ryde Arts Festival week.  In fact the work produced at all three of my workshops – Art Journaling, Matchbox Momentos and the Family History Shrines will be in the exhibition.  Woo Hoo that’s just great.

I am not at work this week well I went in on Monday, but took the rest of the week as annual leave.  The main reason for this is that this weekend is the big Isle of Wight Music Festival and it causes a lot of disruption for me getting to and from work, so this year I decided to avoid the hassle and take time off.  Unfortunately the weather has turned wintery again which is not good considering the time of year, but I am getting a few things done and it’s good just away from the daily grind for a few days.

The page above is the front cover of my fourth Teesha Moore inspired art journal a style, which you know I completely love.  I think and hope that my personal style is now beginning to show.  Anyone looking at my art would know it is inspired by Teesha, but I hope a bit of me shines through too.  Anyway after today’s mixed media workshop I realised it’s been a while since I played with acrylic paints, stencils and stamping and  I think I need to get back into that again soon.  I’ll have to find the time some how….

It’s late, I’m cold (it’s supposed to be mid-summer for goodness sake!) so I’m going to bed now to try and get warm, hopefully Billy the cat will come too – he’s a bit like a living hot water bottle.

Take care my friends and I’ll be back soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂