Hello friends!
Here is my March calendar all ready to be filled in. I know there are at least two exciting things happening this month…
Big love
AJ
Here comes March :-)
21
Tag Archives: mixed media
Bright Colours
Hello friends!
It’s been a bright and sunny day here today and I had intended to go for a long walk this afternoon, but T asked me to help him in the garden so I did that instead. I didn’t get my walk but at least I got some exercise and was out in the sunshine all day. I am tired now, but in a good way.
This spread is from my 6×6 journal. It’s not my greatest achievement and in fact I messed it up so badly I had to gesso over about half of it to redo it. The grey areas are actually very sparkly glitter paper. I never can capture the sparkle with a camera or scanner so you’ll just have to take my word for it. The symbol with the swirls is the symbol for an open mind (according to something I found on the internet).
One of my favourite quotes is from Sir Thomas Dewar (1864 – 1930) he was a Scottish whiskey distiller and salesman.
“Minds are like parachutes… they only function when they’re open.”
That’s all for now, I have to go and iron my work clothes ready for another week of work and I have a cat demanding some urgent tummy tickling too.
See you soon
Big love
AJ 🙂
Cut not the wings of your dreams…
Hello friends
I hope everyone is well and happy.
This spread is from my 6″ x 6″ journal. I covered the pages with printed tissue paper then coloured them with yellow and green sparkly paint, the same batch that had set to a thick jelly and I thought would be unuseable. Then I added the borders with red acrylic paint. I know, I know another strange colour (Eng. spelling :-)) combination from me, but I like it. The background text is from a Tim Holtz reflections stamp. The two patches under the images are some translucent paper I coloured and edged with distress inks. The image of the man’s head is from the Graphics Fairy‘s blog. The girl with the wings may also be from the Graphic Fairy.
The wonderful quote is from Flavia.
That’s all for now.
Big love
AJ
Revo-lution 2012 – Gratitude
Hello friends!
I hope everyone is feeling good.
I’m really pleased to say I am feeling much better this weekend and also that I’ve been given a new project at work which should be more interesting than the work I’ve been doing for the past year (although I will probably have to still do that as well). I’m optimistic about it anyway, it seems like a good change for me.
Here is another spread from my Revo-lution 2012 board book. Check out Gretchen Miller’s blog, Creativity in Motion, for more information about the thinking behind the Revolution book.
Sometimes things in my life are not exactly as I want them to be and if I allow myself I can get to feeling hard done by. I’ve realised it does no good to just feel sorry for myself so my intention this year is to appreciate and feel gratitude for all the good things in my life. When I think about it seriously it is obvious to me the good things far out-number the percieved bad, or problem, things in my life.
Thanks to everyone for your kind comments on my blog, I do try to answer everyone and visit your blogs too. Recently I’ve been having problems leaving comments on Blogger blogs. I’m not sure if that’s a Blogger problem, a WordPress problem or (and this is much more likely) an AJ problem! I’ll try and get it sorted.
My life can be a bit hectic – I work full time and I am committed to the success of our local history group and need to keep the RSHG website up- to-date. Now if I could just have … ooh I don’t know … maybe an extra 4 or 5 hours to each day … I might stand a chance of getting everything done. I know I’m not alone and most creative people have the same dilemas juggling with the day to day stuff. I am still managing to do some art every day, even if it’s only a teeny weeny bit, it’s good for my soul 🙂
Hope you are all being wondrously industrious with your creativity.
Big love
AJ
That was January and here comes February
Hello Friends
I hope everyone is well, I’ve been sick again since Sunday and am having a few days off work to hopefully recuperate. I saw the doctor today and he is arranging for me to have physiotherapy on my neck. The neck seems to be a problem area for me, causing severe headaches and nausea. The doctor also gave me some medicine to take to stop the sickness so that I should at least be able to take and, more importantly, keep down pain-killers when necessary.
Anyway I still managed to get my January calander completed and the new page for February is ready for tomorrow. I will try and use more images for February. January seems to have zipped by in a flash!
T and I are making plans for a short holiday in July to celebrate his 60th birthday we are going up north to Yorkshire, where he was born, for a week. At first he was very reluctant to go away because since our last holiday together we have adopted two beautiful cats. T didn’t like the idea of putting them into a cattery for the week, so he is paying someone to come and house/cat sit for us. I’m sure ‘the boys’ will still be freaked out at having a stranger in the house, but it should be OK as soon as they realise he is going to pet and feed them and let them out every morning. We live in a cemetery and the cats are allowed out in the morning and can play in the cemetery all day, but we like to have them inside at night. There are foxes in the cemetery and although everyone says that in general cats and foxes tolerate eachother and in a fight the fox is likely to come off worse we don’t want to risk it. As far as we can tell ‘the boys’ don’t venture outside of the cemetery, it covers 12 acres of land so they don’t really need to go out on the roads. But then who really knows what they get up to when they are out of sight?
That’s all for now, I hope to get back to normal soon.
Big love
AJ 🙂
Doodles Unleashed – Playful Printmaking
Hello friends!
Strathmore has some fantastic free online workshops at the moment and I decided to sign up for the wonderful Traci Bautista‘s Doodles Unleashed.
If I was a more disciplined person I wouldn’t have done this because there are other things I really should be doing right now, however, I am a hopeless addict to creativity and I couldn’t resist! I watched both video turorials for week 1 Playful Printmaking and then created the above image. It is in a big (12 x 16 inch) Daler Rowney 300 g/m water colour pad.
I was a bit out of my comfort zone creating this page, but I am happy with the way it turned out. I had to laugh because my husband came into the room while I was working on it, he rarely comments on my art, but he looked at this page and said “Hmmm, that’s very psychedelic”!! He didn’t say whether he liked it or now though?
Right, let’s see if I can get this report written before I’m tempted to start the second workshop Spontaneous Water Colour Backgrounds, it’s going to be tough so wish me luck 😉
Big love
AJ
Why do birds sing?
Hello friends!
I hope everyone had a good Christmas and spent time with the people and doing the things they love the best.
We spent Christmas day with my parents and yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and went for a long walk along a beach.
My parents g
ave me a Love Links bracelet and two sets of beads for Christmas, it’s really lovely and something I will treasure always. It was to replace the ring they gave me a couple of years ago. I had that ring on my hand for a couple of months and then one day when I was working on the outside of the house it disappeared. I was heartbroken about losing it and searched high and low but couldn’t find it. Mum wanted to buy me a replacement ring but I thought the bracelet would be safer.
My husband gave me a Sizzix Big Shot (although he didn’t know that until I unwrapped it on Christmas morning, he just knew he had paid for a large box) and I’ve been busy embossing papers and cutting shapes when ever I’ve had a few spare minutes.
The spread above about the birds is not one of my most inspired but it happens to be the next page in the journal. I’ve decided to share good and bad as it’s all part of the process. This spread actually looks grubby to me and I have no idea where that dirty colour came from…
I am back to work tomorrow so I have to use today to catch up with a few outstanding projects.
You can see the gifts I made for my friends for Christmas on the Little Boxes and Things page.
See you all soon
Big love
AJ
Wake Up
Hello Friends!
Today’s spread is my homage to coffee – I drink a lot of coffee (probably too much if the truth be told), I like it. The background is fairly simple, just textured gesso ground, acrylic paint and a Tim Holtz reflections (numbers) stamp, some paper scraps and more gesso. The small coffee related images are from a card kit I bought in a £1 shop, but as I don’t make cards I decided to use them in my journal, and the words are hand written.
Yesterday I went over to the mainland to meet up with the rest of my team for the first time and to have a Christmas lunch with them. They are a good bunch of people and it was nice at last to be able to put faces to names after almost a year of being the isolated member of the team. The lunch was good and we had fun getting to know each other. AND I had time to pop into Hobbycraft on the way home (always a bonus).
Just two more days of work and then it’s Christmas, which means a four day break for me 🙂
I hope you are all doing well.
Big love
AJ
All wrapped up and Ready to Go
Hello Friends
First of all I’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. May all your dreams come true 🙂 I’ve added a little festive snow to my blog.
With just a week to go all the hand made presents are finished and ready to be delivered. I hope my friends enjoy them, I had fun making them, so I hope that will show through.
I can’t tell you what’s inside the parcels yet, but I will show you after Christmas.
Now I can relax a bit and stop panicing. I will be at work all this week and on Wednesday I am going to meet the other members of my team for the first time (I work in a remote location) and we will be having a Christmas lunch. That should be fun, I’ve spoken to a couple of them on the phone and they sounded nice.
The spread above is another from my 6×6 journal – textured gesso ground, torn pages from an old dictionary, vintage images of women, acrylic paint, stamping and hand drawn swirls and writing. Afterwards I thought it probably would have been better to have printed the words as, like many people, when I try to write by hand it hardly ever comes out as I expect and this was a style I’d not tried before. I wasn’t entirely happy with the results, but hey-ho that’s how things turn out sometimes and I do like the message. My life has been extraordinary so far, I’m grateful for that and hoping for more extraordinariness in the future, for me and for you too.
Oh, I just noticed the date 18 December 2011! Today is the 41st anniversary of my first date with my soul mate and life companion. Wow, now isn’t that extraordinary!
See you soon.
Big love
AJ
Everyone…
Hello Friends!
Sorry I haven’t time to write much today, I’m in my usual seasonal panic before Christmas. I’m still trying to make the last of the presents and I’m struggling! Why do I take on these ambitious projects?! I am working on the last two and hope to get them done by the weekend. I’ve made a couple of errors which have set me back a bit, but I’ve just had to work around them because I don’t have time to start from scratch now.
This is another spread from my small 6×6 journal – textured gesso, Inktense and acrylic paint, some scrap paper and more gesso and stamped and written words.
Before I go I’m going to recommend you check out Gretchen Miller’s blog Creativity in Motion she has a great post today about a Gratitude Scroll. Gretchen ran my favourite workshop over at 21 Secrets where we made a Revo-lution book for ourselves. Eventually I will get around to sharing that with you here, but in the meantime check out her blog, it has loads of wonderful creative ideas.
See you soon
Big love
AJ 🙂
AJ's Art Journaling 