New Year Art Journalling

I finished my first art journal page of the year already!

This is a page that I'd already stuck an image on and applied pink paint. I painted a blue border and drew the mandalas in the centre. Then I used Sakura Gelly Rolls to add the words and decorate them. Finally I laid a base in pastel peach paint and drew freehand with a black sharpie. I'd like to try drawing more this year. The one on the left is a doodly mandala, in the style that I've been in the last couple of years. It's starting to seem a bit stale to me! So I tried something in a more art-like style on the right. It's a girl with lots and lots of hair!

I took the pictures in my new light tent which boy gave me for Christmas. The journal only just fits inside, and I couldn't position the camera far enough away to capture the whole double-page spread in one shot. So I took one of both sides and photoshopped them together. That's why it's a bit hinky in the middle! But I really like the even light the tent produces.

This is the light tent. Simple but effective!

A Finished Page and More

I finished an art journal page in my main journal last week. It was one of the pages in my (seemingly perpetual) Unfinished pages post a few months ago. This is a refresher of what it looked like then:

This is the finished page:

I'm calling it the Curlicue Page for obvious reasons. As I wrote previously, I hated the page at first. It grew on me though and now I quite like it, despite its flaws. Yeah, the composition is a bit wonky, but I like the collage elements and colours. I enjoyed drawing the swirlies with various pens so much that I couldn't help but love the page by the end of it! A few weeks later I 'finalised' it, 'branded' it if you will, by writing down a statement that had been swirling through my head for a few days previously. Then it was finished.

The materials I used were: gesso, acrylic paint, glaze medium, wrapping paper, magazine fragments, sugar packet, chopsticks packet, used & franked stamps, lolly wrapper, backing from a sanitary pad, rub-on, embroidery thread, deco tape, ShinHan Art Touch felt pen, Sharpie pen, Sakura gelly roll gel pen, pen & ink (Noodler's brand).

Here's a detail of the top left corner:

For good measure, here's a doodle / mandala thingie I drew last night while I was watching The Man with the Golden Gun. Apparently James Bond inspires. Originally I was going to colour it in with watercolours, but I like it better this way:

And a trip to the health food shop last weekend yielded this:

Sprouts! There are enough there to last Boy and I at least 2 weeks, if they don't go off by then. Perhaps we'll add less seeds next time.

What I've Been Up To

I've been dividing my time pretty evenly between art and craft.
On the craft front, I've started the famed Shrug:

I've decided to call it the Little Trilobite Shrug, as that's what the lacy shapes remind me of. I've done the upper back and just started the left front. I've also been plugging away on the Chequered Baby Blanket and I'm probably about 1/3 of the way through. I could be an Auntie any day now! So I'm starting to feel a pretty urgent need to work on it.

Last week I drew my second Mandala:

I've also been working on my Art Journal:

I decided to ephemera-ise (?!) the brochure I got at the "A Day in Pompeii" exhibition by gluing it into my art journal. This is one of the rare pages that I've had a plan for from start to finish. I really like how it's turning out. Perhaps I should plan them more often! I just had an image in my head of how I wanted it to look. All except for the inside of the brochure:

It's taken me about a month to get this far. I seem to start a lot of pages and then don't know how to finish them. Last week I went through my journal and marked all the pages in progress with sticky notes for convenience. There were 14!! Then I went through again and marked all the pages that I had a plan for. There were 4. But I'm not too worried about that. The whole point is to have fun!
This is another page that's been in limbo for a while. I started working on it again yesterday:

It's sort of dedicated to food and cooking. I cut some images of foods from supermarket catalogues. The page had a quote on it that was really irrelevant to the theme, so I copied it out on another page and painted over it. Today I tried doing some gel transfers on it, but they didn't really work out (see bottom left-hand corner). I'm sure I'll think of something to do with it one day soon!

---

P.S. By "ephemera-ise" I just mean: "don't chuck in the bin."

Kitty Gifts and A Few Quick Drawings

I spent the lead up to Christmas churning out cat toys for all my feline friends:

A three-pronged toy for a trio of troublemakers.

A Triumvirate of toys for a Totally Awesome Cat; and a some for a kitty who doesn't know who he/she is yet.
I did this drawing about a month ago when I was on holidays in Bright. It's the view from the balcony of the cabin that Boy and I were staying in:

Sakura Pigma Micron brush pen in Blue Book.
This is my first mandala, which I drew yesterday and coloured today:

Sharpie marker, watercolour in Blue Book.
It's turned out really well, I think. The watercolours are so much brighter when they're dry. I have decided I like mandalas - I can be creative, but I also like it when everything is symmetrical and in the 'right' spot. With mandalas I can have it both ways.

Enjoy your holidays if you got 'em!

Changes, Part 2 (Electric Boogaloo!)

The next craft project on the chopping block is this:

Ripped! Gone! No Longer!
It's a cushion cover that I was making from the 200 Crocheted Blocks book. When I got the book, I loved it so much that I just wanted to make something ... anything ... from it. So I grabbed some random wool and started on a random block. At some point I decided to make 3 more and turn it into a cushion. Then when the weather got really hot, my brain was too fried for complicated patterns. I started to hate it because the yarn was ugly, the block didn't lie flat, and I'd have to sew a backing for it. So it fell by the wayside (literally: it ended up on the floor next to my bed).

Skip to quite some time later, and I was enthusing over the projects in 200 Knitted Blocks book. I wanted to make another project from it so badly, but Sensible Me knew that starting another blanket would just be silly. Not only do I have the Your Chequered Heart Baby Blanket to finish to a deadline, but I also have the Stitch Sampler Bedspread, the Circular Rug and the Lost Dogs' Home Blanket to finish. One of which I started 18 years ago!! (Not the Lost Dogs' Home Blanket, though my conscience twinges whenever I think about it. Yes, it's true. I have craft guilt.) So, no, another blanket is out of the question.

The book had samples for a couple of cushions as well as blankets, and that seemed like a capital idea. After all, I have 2 new couches that are just begging for a little adornment. And if I chose my design and yarn carefully, this could be a project I loved from start to finish. So on the weekend I sat down and designed some cushions:

I had a lot of fun with this - combining drawing, design and crafting. Well, crafting on paper, anyway. Years ago I read about young architects - very rarely do their designs ever get built, but they design anyway for practice and experience. They call it Paper Architecture. I guess what I was doing was Paper Knitting. I may make them one day. I may not. It doesn't really matter. I have to return the book to the library in a distressingly short period of time, so it's comforting to know that I have some-ready-to-go projects stashed away in my Blue Book. (That's just my drawing journal, but lately I've been thinking of it that way because it has a blue cover.)

As promised a while back, here's a photo of the doodle I drew in my Blue Book when the weather was too hot to do anything that required brain power:

It's my first attempt at a 'doodle' style drawing. I really like it. The only negative was that I coloured it in with watercolour pencils, and then it took FOR. EVER. to go over all the details with water and a brush, making sure they dried in between so they didn't bleed. It was a major pain and I gave up about half way through. Next time I think I'll use normal pencils. I added some mandala motifs in there. I want to try doing a full mandala next.

---

P.S. In an effort to make sure I blog regularly, I actually wrote this post before I even started doing anything about the Former Cushion Cover. I'm eager for blog-love! Really!

P.P.S. The photos today come from the Can't Be Arsed School of Photography.

P.P.P.S. I've started writing a new zine!