Art Journal Freedom by Dina Wakley

A couple of years or so ago now I took a class at Art from the Heart with Dina Wakely.  When I make cards I love a lot of white space on them and I particularly wanted to transfer this to my journaling.  Dina's new book, 'Art Journal Freedom',  has a whole chapter on 'white space' and was a great reminder of her workshop.

It really is a fabulous book, and quite different to the other journaling books on the market, teaching about composition and colour theory - knowing the rules means you can break them if you like!

I used Dina's 'circle' page design, creating a swirl of watercolour before adding some texture to some of the lines with a pecil crayon then adding circles through a large piece of 'sequin waste'.  I stamped a couple of the flowers then drew the other two before adding the words from a Stampotique stamp.  Dina's challenge is to create a second page using the same elements but in different quantities.  I've not done that yet.  I did, however, NoT do a double page spread, which is my usual way of working!!!  Quite a breakthrough for me!  I just felt that the page was too long and thin, as a double page spread, to carry this composition.

My 'low cloud' page did work well this size though.  On the first day of our ski-ing holiday my youngest son questioned whether we could refer to 'low cloud' whilst up in the mountains as, surely, it was just that we were high up and maybe we should call it 'high people' instead!  This really tickled me so I carved a couple of stamps - one of a tree, the other with the word 'cloud' - and made a journal page.

I used Tim's umbrella man and put him at the top of the mountain because I really did meet a lady with an umbrella whilst walking at the top of 'Saulire' between two ski lifts!  It was snowing.  

I made the mountains from a piste map and added the true names and heights of a couple of the mountains I went to the top of using my pedestrian ski lift pass.

Coming 'down' is a bit scary!  But the lift attendants were all lovely, and often slowed the lift down at the end to help me get off!!

And it was definitely worth it for the views!

What on earth was I thinking?!!!

... when I decided NoT to include my snowflake stencil in my travel journal kit for a week in the French Alps!!!

Whilst the rest of my family went ski-ing (I tried it a few years ago and it scared the living daylights out of me so I stuck to walking this time!) I had time to read, walk and journal :)

Bliss!

The view from the apartment changed daily, sometimes snowy, sometimes cloudy, sometimes very clear, but it did have an influence on my journal pages.

I made myself a couple of stencils.  One of the little tree you may be able to see peeping behind the building in the carpark in the above picture; and of a snowflake!  Funnily enough, after hankering after a snowflake image I didn't use it that much, but still...

My other influences were a couple of journaling books I bought recently to bring away with me.  I love Melanie Testa's style of journal page so treated myself to 'Dreaming from the Journal Page'

Her suggestions for 'decorative drawing' [pg 84] got me adding some drawn texture to my pages.

I took two journals with me, and worked in both (well, a couple of small ones snuck in there two but I didn't use them).  One of them is my typewriter teaching guide, which I love to use, and the second was a new one from Hobby craft - the same size as the typewriter book but plain cartridge paper inside.  Both books are A4 in size, but in landscape format, so the pages are really long when you work on a double spread.

Although I really like this page now, it took a lot of working at, and didn't feel quite as relaxing as when I splash a bit of ink or paint on a page and respond to it from there on in (although learning curves don't tend to be that relaxing!)  It's my 'Melanie Testa' style page!

I did enjoy painting with my watercolours though, something  I used to enjoy at school but hadn't really incorporated into my journals.  I really like the contrast of pencil with paint and pen and added some visual texture by tracing within my stencils - not that is ReaLLY fun!

I have more pages to share, but will keep them for another post, some inspired by my other new book, Dina Wakley's 'Art Journal Freedom' which I HiGHLY recommend.

more later, as promised ;)

Met two very busy people, one gave me a sample, the other didn't...guess who!!!

 [Sue, next time we see an old ledger, we MuST buy it, this one was FaBuLouS!!]

Dyan's ledger book was 'absolutely fabulous darling'!  Full of colour, images, writing, and wonderful snippets of someone's handwritten numbers.  Every time I saw Dyan the ledger was held close with both hands!

It's that first mark in such an old book that's the hardest, but this ledger would never be looked in otherwise, so a great new use for it!

Carol was very taken with Dyan's Dina Wakley style kitchen roll, used to mop up excess ink:

Then of course my yummy tag was from the Timness himself. 

I AdOrE the new distress ink stains, the colour is so easy to apply, and looks fantastic layered, and is oh so, so vibrant.  The kraft paper is a must too for lovers of kraft paper with black printing on - fab, fab, fab.

And check out my 'crinkldy' ribbon!  So easy to customise with the ink stains.  I did like the perfect pearls mists, which spray the shine without a coloured ink, but I don't use that idea enough to warrant them ... yet!

But the distressing tool has been added to my birthday list - so much better than my scissors!  There was a very cool looking little dispenser for tissue tape, which just looked too cute not to have lol!

I must also share a pic of another special person (I'd show you Wendy and Jennie and Kate and Colin too but didn't take your photo!!!) learning to knit/crochet with some fabulously therapeutic wool from the Wendy wool company:

We called it 'monkey wool' as it looked like monkey's tails, and the pieces on the wall looked like monkeys!  It's texture is like fleecy jumpers - cosy!

finally caught up...Dina Wakely workshops

Sue and I had a real treat earlier this month.....we went up to Art from the Heart in Harrogate where Dina Wakely was teaching two days of workshops.

I've been keeping my eye on Dina's blog for a while as I love her use of 'white space' on the page, as well as her splodgy, inky, splattery effects.  

Dina was working in the most enormous book (full of yummy paper :)  )

Day One saw us exploring masks, and thinking about image placement on the page.  It was great to use masks that I wouldn't normally try...stars and flowers are usually my choice of image, but I love how the lady (she did have a name, Betty probably!!) turned out.

The people on the workshop were a great bunch and it was amazing to see how we all started with the same prompts yet produced such different work.

We were kept thoroughly entertained, and the snacks also kept us laughing!!!

On the way in to Art from the Heart we met Milliande (centre of photo below), whose online videos on art journalling I've watched.  [do check them out, I think they are brilliant!]

We discovered we were all staying in the same place so hooked up later for dinner and a good chat, with time later to share our journals.

[sorry for the poor photo, it was a bit dark in the room; thought it was worth sharing the piccie anyway]

Milliande had some gorgeous pages in her journal and showed us some she'd done for her January 'page a day'.

Day 2 involved a change of seat, a change of name [i just fancied being labelled differently so I was 'Alice', Sue was 'Fred', and we certainly weren't short of other cheeky girls to join in the fun :) ] and lots of layering.

We were very definitely the noisy end of the table, which surprised Dyan, she'd got the impression from my blog and the lovely things people say about me that I was quiet!!!! ;)

Er, no, not when I'm happy!  And throwing myself into my artwork

I felt like Harry Potter giving my page a good old splattering!! [Only when he holds a stick like this it's to conjure up a magic spell]. 

 

I love the layered piece I made that morning.  Milliande concentrated on making a piece in her journal with 'white space', and succeeded wonderfully [sorry I didn't get a piccie of it] and even used peeloffs  to great effect!

Actually, there was a distinct lack of peeloffs in this workshop, we had to bring our own ;) lol  Not that I could persuade Sue to use hers!!!  I do love the colours she used in this piece.

 I played with embedding objects...

before focusing on leaving a 'white space' on a page.  This is still unfinished, but I'm pleased with it so far.

As the workshop was over by about 4pm, we decided to continue back at the Premier Inn.  This is a bit difficult to do in one of their rooms as there is limited space, but sweet talking the lady at the reception desk (or putting your foot in it, which is what I did - fancy mentioning paint!!!) meant we got to play in the meeting room.

We set out our 'stuff'', then worked on each other's journals for a timed ten minutes at a time, before moving onto the next one.  My camera battery gave out at this point so Milliande took the piccies.  It was a fabulous experience, and I love my resulting page :)

Day three saw us travelling back down the motorway after a sneaky visit to Harrogate for brunch.  And look who came in after us!!!  Great minds and all that!!