Tag Archives: layers

Concentrate the Mind on the Present Moment

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Concentrate the Mind on the Present MomentHello friends

I am still a bit discombobulated after the fantastic weekend at the Call of the Wild Soul Art Retreat.  I am still pretty much on a ‘high’ from the wonderful experience and all the lovely people I met.

This is a spread in my new altered book journal and I am linking it to the Fall Fearless and Fly challenge.  Click the link to see the rules and to find out more about the challenge 🙂

The First Set of Prompts:  Headline Prompt:  Inventing the Future:  Where do you want to be 5, 10, 15 years from now.  What’s holding you back?  What’s propelling you forward?  What do you need to do or stop doing to create your future? Color Prompt:  Warm colors (reds, oranges, pinks, yellows) Quote Prompt:  “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”  Abraham Lincoln

Well I have used warm colours and although I didn’t use the actual quote my spread has a ‘time’ theme.  First of all I collaged images of clocks, watches and hour-glasses all over the pages; gave them a wash of watered down gesso; finger painted with brown, red, russet, orange and neon pink acrylic paints; more collage with beautiful chinese papers (given to me by  Katie Flowers, one of the new friends I met at the Art Retreat, and who travelled all the way from Hong Kong to join us); I found a great quote about time which is attributed to Buddha – printed it out on my computer in Samarkan font, tore around the words and coloured the paper with Tattered Rose Distress ink and edged with Orange Stazon ink; the image of Buddha I found on the internet and I recoloured it in photoshop (to give it a warm hue) before printing it out and adding to the page; I edged and shaded the pages with brown and red Portfolio water soluable oil pastels.  Finally I added the butterfly which was also a gift I received at the art retreat (I am really sorry I can’t remember who gave that to me).

Well that’s it from me, I hope you like it.  (If you click on the image you can see it larger and in more detail).

Big love and see you soon

AJ 🙂

 

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 🙂

The Power of One

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The Power of One

Hello friends

I can’t believe how fast this weekend has gone and that tomorrow I will be back at work again!

Yesterday I did some transcribing in the cemetery then I went into town (just down the road) and did some shopping.   After that I spent the rest of the day producing information sheets about the ten year history of Ryde Social Heritage Group.

Today I did housework and washing, checked and printed out the information sheets, went to see Mum and Dad, and just about managed to squeeze in a short time for some art.  And now the weekend is over!

There is still a lot of uncertainty at work but I am staying optimistic, it just feels like a change could be good.

The textured canvas above is something I did on 21 Secrets.  The ‘canvas’ was made from a workshop by Alma Stoller and the texture effect from a workshop by Christy Tomlinson.  When I did my presentation on Employee Engagement recently I was told that I needed to take a prop with me.  I had no idea what to take and I ended up making this piece of art and I was very pleased with it.  As it turned out though the prop was not required and no-one saw it.  Now the ‘canvas’ is sitting on my window shelf at work.

Have a great week everyone, I’m just going to help round up and feed a couple of naughty cats before it gets dark.

Big love

AJ 🙂

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 🙂

July – is it summer yet?

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JulyHello friends

Here is my spread for July for Kate Crane’s Calender Challenge.  I seem to have a butterfly theme this month 🙂

June was really busy for me so I didn’t get much time to doodle on my June spread, just recorded day by day what was happening in my life.  Here is the completed June spread.

June completeSorry, no time to write anything else today, Tony and I are going away for a week on Friday and I have loads of preparation to do before then.

Have a good week.

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 🙂

The Journey

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The JourneyHello friends!

I hope you are having a good week.  Mine is going fine.

For this spread in my 6×6 journal I started with a page that had some horrible dark green paint on it and the opposite page had dabs of pink ink.  Not a great combination!   I collaged copies of old maps and papers from the Papermania Bookprint collection onto the pages.  I coloured them with Inktense blocks and water.  Where I had used Mod Podge to stick the papers down it acted as a resist to the colour – a nice effect.  I finger painted the whole spread with an ‘eggyolk’ yellow acrylic paint and then added the circles by stamping brown acrylic paint using bottle caps.  I thought it needed some contrast so I stencilled blue acrylic paint through punchinella and a big dot stencil.  Finally I added the words using brown Stazon and a set of tiny letters I purchased at Hobbycraft a while ago.

Making the spread was a bit of a journey, I had no idea where I was going with it when I started and I wasn’t sure where I was when I finished.  It was good fun though 🙂

Enjoy the rest of your week.

Big love

AJ 🙂

As We Grow Up

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As We Grow Up

Hello friends

Well we finally had some sunshine, and oh boy! doesn’t it make a difference, everything looks and feels better when the sun shines.

Yesterday I did a lot of work in the garden.  The only area of responsibility I have in the garden is cutting the grass, but because I don’t do it very often, the two grassy areas are more weed patches than grass and look very scruffy.  This contrasts very badly with the rest of the garden which is very neat and tidy, as are most things in my husband’s life (apart from me).  I really don’t know how he puts up with me, he is obsessive about tidiness, and I live my life surrounded by clutter and stuff!

Anyway I cut down the two weed patches and they now look slightly more respectible, however I am pleased to say I have finally convinced T that we should do away with the grass altogether.  The area at the back of the house where we occassionally sit on the rare occasions when it’s warm enough will be paved (when we can afford it) and the garden at the front of the house is going to have raised beds so T can grow even more vegetables.  This is a huge relief for me I can tell you, and gives him more growing space – he loves his home grown veg.

Today was even more glorious but I woke up feeling poorly and spent most of the morning in bed.  When I did get up there were chores to do and then a visit to my parents.  Fortunately I have a day off work tomorrow so I will be able to enjoy a day that I felt like I missed today – if you see what I mean?

This spread is from my A4 journal, it looks a bit busy, but I was pleased with how it turned out.  I did it a while ago so I can’t really remember the whole process, but there are ripped and die cut old book pages, acrylic paints, gesso, stamping and a really cool, but very long quote I found.  It starts “As we grow up” and ends “live in the moment because every second you spend angry or upset is a second of happiness you can never get back”.

I think if you click on the image you should be able to see it big enough to read the whole quote  – it’s a good one.  I use all these quotes because I am really trying to improve myself – to improve in my art and in my attitude and outlook.  I don’t always succeed and I definitely do have negative periods, but I’m trying and slowly I feel that I am getting to grips with it.

I hope you are having a great weekend.

Big love

AJ 🙂

The Moment is Now!

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The Moment is NowHello friends!

Happy Wednesday to you I hope you are all well and happy.  I am fine, but I’m feeling physically exhausted at the moment – in a good way I think.

I’ve been doing something completely different at work last week and this week, it’s interesting but tiring for me.

This is a spread from my 6×6 journal.  I started by collaging some images I’d printed but because my printer was running out of ink the colours came out really strange.  Rather than throw them out I decided to use them as a base for a journal page.  I also ripped up some of the local newspaper the was lying on my work table and stuck that down too.  Then I finger painted with blue acrylic, I used a handcut stencil and some blue distress ink then I over collaged with scrapbook paper and the quote which I hand wrote.  I know I should credit the author, but I’m sorry I can’t remember this time.  Finally I overstamped with a paisley stamp and black Stazon and a flower stamp and blue Stazon and I edged the pages with the blue ink too..

Right, I’m off to bed now to get some rest before another busy day of site visits.

I’ll be back soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂