Tag Archives: mixed media

Follow Your Dreams

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Follow Your Dreams

Hello friends

We are back from our holiday in Yorkshire.  We had a great time, even though it rained a lot.  We rented a small cottage next to a farm out in the country and spent most of the time with T’s friends and family.  We ate out every evening and had some great meals.  The best place we ate was called Aagrah on the canal at Skipton – the best Indian meal I’ve eaten outside of India – truly fantastic.  There was an Asian supermarket in the town where T’s sister lives so we stocked up on spices, pulses and goodies before we came home.  (The second best Indian meal I’ve eaten outside of India has been cooked by my husband, who is an excellent amateur chef and a master curry maker) 🙂

I am feeling quite tired today, probably owing to the fact that I drove for 8 hours yesterday with just two short comfort breaks.  Despite having a lovely holiday it was good to be home.

The boys were fine while we were away, they ignored us for a while after we got home but when T opened his suitcase to unpack Jack jumped in and refused to move;  Billy sat on my lap for about an hour in the evening demanding to have his tummy tickled and then when I went to bed he came too and snugggled up close to me all night.

This spread is about exploring texture – scrumpled up tissue paper, a couple of swabs my dentist gave me after she extracted a tooth (but i didn’t need to use them), a piece of film, metal leaf and some feathers.  Also used acrylic paint, Adirondak Colorwash spray, acrylic ink and correction fluid.  If you watch Donna Downey’s videos you will probably see that I have been inspired by her in making this spread (circles and drippage) :-).

Back to work tomorrow and I have lot of catching up to do.  The week before I went away I had a great week and was hardly in the office at all.  I had to give some presentations with our HR Director on Employee Engagement.  I did it three times – the first time was in front of the people I work with locally there were about 40 of them, the second time the audience was probably about 250 and the third time about 150.  Normally when I speak in front of people I use notes, so I don’t forget anything important, but this time I did it without notes.  The director asked me three questions which I had to answer – Who are you? What have you been doing in your area to improve things for your colleagues? and Why did you become an employee engagement champion.  Everytime I said something different, but I did get lots of compliments from the directors and audience afterwards so I went on holiday with a great feeling.  Tomorrow I will have to figure out how I am going to catch up with 2 weeks of outstanding emails and actions, however I will not get stressed about it because I have realised finally that just doesn’t help.

I’ll be back soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

The Destination

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Destination

Hello friends

I hope everyone is well and happy.

This is my last post before we go off on holiday so I will be having a bit of a blog break for about a week and a half.  It’s going to be strange and quite refreshing to have no internet access for a while, but I am taking a few art supplies and a new journal I have made especially for the trip.

It is T’s 60th birthday and we are going to Keighley in Yorkshire where he was born and spent the first 16 years of his life.  We haven’t been there for about 40 years.  I hope it’s a good trip because he doesn’t have much of a memory of growing up, I think his childhood was quite traumatic, his parents split up when he was about 11 years old.   He wants to go back to his roots, but I hope it doesn’t bring back too many unhappy memories for him.

We will be seeing his best friend from school, his sister and an aunt so we are looking forward to that.

It’s hard to believe that the boy I fell in love with all those years ago will be 60 in a few days time (even harder to think I am just a few years behind him)!  Our relationship is as solid now as it’s ever been.  Love is a wonderful thing and I am lucky I found my soul mate when I was just 15 years old.

We are both going to be quite traumatised at leaving ‘the boys’, our two cats behind, but we have a friend coming to stay in the house and look after them while we are gone.  Hopefully everything will be OK.  We have never had children so these two beautiful cats mean the world to us both and we have never left them before.

For this spread I used gesso, acrylic paint, some bits of old maps, a dots rubber stamp and some tape I made.  I used microporous surgical tape and stuck it down on a sheet of acetate then printed text and old maps onto the sheet.  It wasn’t hugely successful, as the printing is not as ‘fast’ as it would have been if I’d stamped with Stazon ink, but not a bad effect.  The face is an image I cut from a National Geographic magazine.  The edges are inked with distress ink.

Right, I’ve got to go and pack, hope you all have fun while I’m away.

Big love

AJ 🙂Bengal Boys

The Bengal Boys  (they are not pure bred Bengal, but they have the leopard spots and many Bengal traits).  They look really sweet in this photograph but generally they don’t like being too close to each other any more!  Boys!

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 🙂

Life’s Treasures

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Life's Treasures

Hello friends!

OK so I promised something ‘prettier’ this time, the scan doesn’t really do the spread justice because you can’t see all the glitter and shine on the page.

This spread was a challenge from a friend.  She went to a craft show and when she came back she gave me this small bag containing lots and lots of tiny pieces of fabric saying “I expect you can do something creative with those”.  Hmmm, I looked at the bag for a while and wondered.

These pages were already painted a very dull and pale pink colour and I just stared sticking the little pieces of fabric over the background, using ModPodge, until both pages were covered,  you can just see some of the pink background.  I kept thinking about the little things in life, the moments, when they are all brought together can turn into something significant (deep eh!).  Then I started adding, glitter, gems and embellisments to the pages to give some dimension.  I couldn’t find an appropriate quote so I made one up (based on many that I’ve read before).

That’s it for now, I hope everyone is well and happy.  Today, at least for now which is early morning, the sun is shining – a rare event in recent weeks here – so I need to go out and make the most of it!

See you 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 🙂

Perfection/Harmony

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Perfection and/or HarmonyHello friends!

I hope everything is good with you all.

Here is my mid-week posting, it’s a page from my A4 journal.  Unusually it’s just a single page, not a spread and I’ve already shown you the opposite page here.

There are quite a lot of layers on this page, torn papers, images downloaded from the internet, home made washi tape (inspired by my friend Carolyn at a Colorful Journey), the stamps are by Lost & Found My Mind’s Eye range, I think the set might be called Rosy ‘Everything’, I stencilled black and red acrylic paint through punchinella and added the quote to finish it off.  The page was made some time ago at a time when I was struggling with some conflict in my life.

I have realised that making art like this really grounds me, I can sort stuff out in my head, breath, calm myself down.  I made a page that I think is pleasing to look at from a situation that felt really ugly and uncomfortable for me.  I hope you like it.

I hope the week is going well for you.

Big love

AJ 🙂

Caribbean Cool

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Caribbean CoolHello friends

I hope you have all had a good weekend, mine has been busy.  Spent the last two days working in the Heritage Centre in the Cemetery helping to set up an exhibition on Royalty and Ryde for our two Open Days next weekend.  There is still quite a lot of work to do but nevertheless we made good progress and it will all look good.   Now we just have to hope some people turn up to make it worthwhile.

The spread above is about my wedding on February 2 2007, I’ve written about that event before so I won’t bore you with the details again, except to say that I absolutely love the Island of Tobago and in particular the quiet fishing village of Castara.  Our wedding was just before sunset on top of Mount Dillon overlooking beautiful Castara Bay, it was perfect.

To make the spread I first covered the pages completely with images cut from magazines, all the images were predominently an intense blue – the colour of the Caribbean sea, then I lightly gesso’d over the top, stamped and stencilled in red, yellow and green also colours of the Caribbean, and blue fishes.  Then I added three images;  the ‘Welcome to Paradise’ sign was on a tree outside Cascreole beach bar (where we had supper after our wedding), one image is of the wedding party – two locals, Susan and Horace Jackson (Horace was one of the witnesses), me, T and the lovely minister Brent Hart, the photo was taken by Paul T’s best man.  There was no-one else there.  The third photo is of one of the many beautiful sunsets you can see from the beach at Castara.  The blue heart is a die cut baby wipe I had used to wipe some blue paint.

This spread makes me happy.

It’s my Dad’s 90th birthday on Wednesday and we are going out for a meal to celebrate that night so I probably won’t be able to post anything until next weekend.

I’ll be thinking of you all and I’ll be back as soon as I can.

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 🙂