This spread combines two passions – art & history.  I wanted the pages to have an aged and vintage look.  The background for both pages are old maps, the first page has an old map of London and the Thames and the second page has a very ancient map (a copy) of the island where I live.  The collage images are my attempt to give depth to the pages, while also prettying them up, the piece in the corner of the second page is an extract from a story I found on Google Books.  Sketches of a pedestrian in the Isle of Wight was published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1816 and tells of a walking holiday on the Isle of Wight at a time when there were few roads and many of the small towns, villages and hamlets were fairly isolated.   The story is serialised in the magazine over a number of months but unfortunately is not complete.  I have transcribed all of the episodes that were in a magazine to put into a folder for my local history group.

I realised a few days ago that some of the images in recent post has been resized incorrectly when I saved them for the web.  The images look a little ‘squarer’ than they should do, but as I didn’t notice for a while I won’t be resizing them.  In future though I will keep the pages to the correct dimensions.

Big love

AJ

I do have a French connection, one of my brothers married a French girl and they live near Paris with their family.  I’ve never visited France though even though I always love to see my brother and his family when they visit England.  We had French lessons when I was at school, but I didn’t get on with it very well so I can’t even speak basic French, I’m a typical Brit and can only speak English!  Shame on me, my brother and his family are all bi-lingual.

This spread came about because I wanted some script on my pages and I haven’t got a script rubber stamp.  I found this hand written letter in French on the internet and then found images that I thought would compliment it.  For the background I used various shades of blue acrylic and water colour and stamped over it with white ink.   I don’t think you can see it online, but the lady from the Folies Bergeres was coloured in with glitter pen and on the page she really sparkles.  I quite like the effect but I think I need to try and find a way to lighten my pages, they all look too dark to me.

I’m not sure if the image of the Gold Dust Twins is really politically correct so just wanted to say I mean no offence, I had never seen this American advertising before, it’s from the late 1800s/early 1900s, and I just liked the image of the two children juggling the plates.

I’ve been watching lots of YouTube and Ustream videos made about mixed media and art journals and I am blown away by the talent and creativity of so many people, they are really inspiring.  However I have become aware that watching these videos is also making me want more and more things, I’ve been thinking “I’ve got to have this and I’ve got to have that, how can I do art journaling if I haven’t got all these things”.  But now I’ve decided that I really need to try and be creative with what I’ve got, and use what’s around me or what I can find.  I have a few paints, stamps, papers, pens and a few basic masks and stencils so I will just have to make do with those until I can get to a decent craft store (there isn’t one anywhere near where I live) or go online when I can afford to buy stuff.  I will have to buy more gesso fairly soon but apart from that my challenge to myself is ‘Let’s see what you can do with what you’ve got’.

This spread uses a Tim Holtz mask I purchased, some advertising images from the web, a white paper border I found in my craft box, some acrylic and water colour paints.