Art Journal Everyday

day six

I am still surprised that I successfully completed the #100dayproject over on Instagram and decided that this year I'd try art journaling everyday.

day seven

I'm working in a Daler Rowney sketchbook 5 x 5.75.  I don't always like what I produce ..

day eight

.. but that's ok as sometimes I really love it!  I do, however, feel very chilled even if I only spend 5 - 10 mins on a page.

day nine

Some days I have more time than others

day ten

... and that's ok too.  And it's a great place to use up scraps, or try out a new stamp.

day eleven

I didn't wait until January 1st to start either, I just got started right away.  You can see a step by step to my first page here

day twelve

..and I post daily as @sarahthemoodler over on Instagram.  

Thanks for taking the time to peruse my art journal!

tea bags on a journal page

I've really enjoyed this month's challenges from the Documented Life Project where the theme has been translucent papers.

The final challenge was to use tea bags or dryer sheets so I emptied out a teabag and trapped a leaf and some coloured papers inside using wax.

The scratch sheet from my recent play with my gelli plate had an excellent array of colours and texture, providing a number of options as the background for my tea bag.

I decided on the darker blue and stitched it to the page.

I have a fair collection of leaf stamps and chose these lovely oak leaves to add to the page.  This may or may not be finished - I might add some words cut out of a poetry book!

playing with my gelli plate

I always have great plans at half term - catching up on schoolwork, catching up on housework, planning out new ideas for the classroom, decorating in the house, clearing out, gardening (getting those spring bulbs in)....

In reality I actually just needed a really good rest and after sleeping a lot and catching up with friends I made myself play with my paints and gelli plate on Friday morning - play is rest too, and is VeRy good for you!

The colours this autumn have been amazing.  I've done a lot of driving through the Cheshire countryside this week, being Mum's taxi for my son who was doing some work experience with a farrier - the drive has been a real treat to just soak in the amazing colours of the leaves.

So I took the leaves and autumn colours for inspiration as I played.

I brayered Dina Wakley's acrylic paints onto the gelli plate, pressed down some stencils then laid down a leaf before taking the print.  These just shout out for some zen doodling inside the leaf shape!

Removing the leaf and taking a second print is actually my favourite result though :)

I had a bit of play with other colourways too.  I love black and white backgrounds with added colour so look forward to adapting this piece.  The paints used are  'night' combined with 'umber'.

Some of the leaves are still green 

which makes a nice combo with oranges, yellows and browns.

I then chose to play with my little 3" x 5" gelli plate, exploring the use of dark blue

trying out new colourways such as yellow ochre and grey

and layering colours into my little journal, ready for some imagery

By the end of all this playing, I had a fantastic sheet of paper created by cleaning off my brayer in addition to the many sheets of gelli printed papers :)

Sometimes I find it easy to play but I really had to work at it this time.  It was worth it though :)

step by step art journal page

I thought it might be fun to take step by step photos of the journal page and share them here.

I've been thinking about doing a page with leaves on for a while now and was recently given a set of leaf stamps.

I decided it might be fun to use these, although they don't lend themselves to an autumn theme, which might have been fun.  I love the colours at this time of year.

First step was to tidy my desk, then I stamped up the leaves to see how they stamped and what they looked like inked up...

I've always loved both ferns and ivy, and have plenty of both in my garden, but decided that today I'd go with the ivy leaves as a theme for my page.

I sprayed a selection of green inks...

...then pressed a stencil down onto the wet ink.  This gave some subtle texture to the page and I thought it might be nice to stamp some text over the stencil in some areas.

I could only find one green dye ink pad, so made a mental note to add a dark green to my shopping basket next time I'm buying craft supplies.  I stamped the text on scrap paper to see the ink was the right shade and decided to go with it.

I like using unmounted rubber stamps to apply patches of pattern to a page - you can curve them slightly to add randomly shaped areas of texture.

After lifting off the stencil there was quite a bit of ink left on it so I turned it over and used a baby wipe to wipe the ink back onto the page, dabbing small areas too.

Et voila!  I liked that, but now what?

Time to pause, dunk my biscuit in my tea and think about how I'd add the leaves to my page.

I'd wiped some ink from my stencil onto the scrap paper I'd stamped on earlier so decided to cut out the ivy leaf....

... and I was able to make some more green paper up quickly by wiping over the oversprayed ink with a wet baby wipe.

The leaves looked good but needed something more so ...

... I stamped some directly onto the page.  Then came a bit of an 'eeek' moment, when I didn't like how the leaves were sitting together.

A few deep breathes later and I decided they looked ok and they just needed some depth.

A quick look amongst my newly tidied pens etc and I easily put my hands on a charcoal pencil and added some shading under the leaves.

What I couldn't lay my hands on was my blending tool, but a cotton bud did the trick just as well, smudging the charcoal to create shadows.

I fancied adding some curly tendrils but didn't want to spoil the page so decided to blot away some ink through a stencil to see if I liked the design.  I was tempted to draw through the stencil with a green pen.

I did like it, but changed my mind about the pen.  I rarely clean my stencils which means I often add unintentional colours to my pages... and today was no different.  I loved the browny orange hints and continued deliberately adding them around the page.

Happy journaling everyone!!

where does time go?

Actually, I know exactly where it went, although I still can't believe it's a whole week since my last post! I taught a journalling class at Paddy's last Saturday and Tuesday. Both classes went fabulously but I was exhausted afterwards and couldn't do much the next day. I've also moved classrooms at school (teachers still work in the holidays!!!) and been working hard on the last of the corsets as one has quite a few people left to work on it before Sept.

This is one of Anne Jagger's pages which we all loved. People were great at trying out new colour combinations and I love her use of purple and red together. Anne was happily splashing paint around whilst Paddy was out of the room. When Paddy came back, she was very pleased with the pinkish splashes that had been added to her pages :) Check out more of Anne's pages here.

The aim of the class was to get one page finished and have backgrounds started on a few more so they could be continued at home. Another was to use our favourite stamp images in our journal pages as so often we use the images for cards for friends and never see them ourselves. I shared Pam Carriker's tip of using charcoal to highlight images (thanks Pam) and everyone loved it!

Jess' theme for her journal was finishing school and the school hols -

Chris, Neet and Sue have all put their photos and comments (thanks guys) on their blogs so head over and admire and let them know what you think of their pages! On Saturday, Chris brought some of her favourite stamps with her which we all fell in love with and have had to put in a bulk order for!! Aren't these just so fab :) They're available from the Stamp Bug.

So as you can see, we were very, very busy :)