art journaling on a sunny weekend in Wales

We were very kindly invited to join some friends on a weekend break in North Wales this weekend.  It was fabulous, the highlight being seeing dolphins close to the shore as we paddled this morning.  Jon attempted to join them in the water but they preferred swimming alone lol!

We were staying near Aberdaron on the Lleyn Peninsula, an area in which my family spent many happy camping holidays when my sister and I were small; and I've never seen dolphins in these waters before :)

The cottage was beautifully decorated, and had STuNNiNG views...

It was unseasonably warm, but signs of autumn were definitely about ...

We had a wonderfully relaxed weekend, with time to read, play games, walk, and I had time to journal :)

As we were leaving on Friday I grabbed an old book I'd bought for the covers.  I was going to use them to make a journal but decided to use the whole book instead.  It's approximately A4 size; I didn't have any gesso with me so used layers of emulsion paint instead.

One of the owners of the book had used a felt tip pen which came through the paint.  The blue and pink rectangle is a result of this, and encouraged me to add these shades throughout the page.  

I do love the effect of my Stabilo Woody pencils (the waxy watercolour ones) on the emulsion :)

an insightful carrot [or PDCC25!]

Better late than never for my play date cafe design piece!  I so wanted to get a piece done for this week's challenge as my new carrot (from Wendy at The Stamp Attic) stamp was just too appropriate not to use!!!  I had such a busy week last week and into this, so I took some journal time last night to relax.

These pages had pieces of text on them from teaching my Art Journaling 2 class and the text still peeks through the white dabber paint in places.  Tim's clock mask is one of my favourites, along with sequin waste so I happily splooshed and stamped my black and white paints and added the odd hint of orange.

I found the quote after googling 'carrot quotes'.  Who'd have thought Paul Cezanne would have been discussing carrots!

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To colour my carrot boy, I wet my stamp and coloured it with caran d'ache neocolour watersoluble wax pastels.  I then stamped onto dry card and coloured his body in with colour from the pastel on my brush.

the bird

Yes, Julie guessed right, I painted a bird on the wall once everyone had gone home on Saturday night :)

She's the bird from Hero Arts Clear Design:  Birds and Branches and I fell in love with her after putting her on my art journal. 

  

On the journal I stamped the bird on scrap paper and paper pieced her body onto the cover.  And fell in love with that flourish by Mr Holtz :)

Miss Bird's painted with Adirondack acrylic paint dabbers and the texture was created by stamping a variety of stamps, mostly from Tim Holtz.  She just needs a bit of company now, and to be surrounded by nature ... over to you Sue, you're there next ;)

Back to art journaling, I know you'd love to see some of the pages everyone created on Saturday.  I love how people's styles, personality, interests and sense of colour shine through even the background pages. 

  

Jen's backgrounds including dabbing, stencilling, masking, and printing with bubble wrap and cardboard.  Gorgeous yummy colour combos.

 

Lesley's pages stacked and ready to stamp onto.  The top page ended up with a Buddha stamped in white, with the words peace surrounding it - beautiful!

 

Laura's background pages now stamped with images she loves...aren't those images beautiful :)

Kathy's 'time' pages, with masking, stamping, collage and highlighting.  What did we do before white Sakura gel pens were available? ;)

 

Joan loved the bird too!  I work very 'parallel' to the sides of the page and love how Joan uses diagonals.  Her pages reminded me of Kandinsky's work.

Every single one of us used the Pool coloured paint, and I loved it when Kay combined it with Lemonade/ Peach Bellini.  In fact, when I drove to school this am the sky was these colours plus grey...colour inspiration is everywhere :)

holiday journalling

This is the first time I've been away and packed fairly succinctly craft wise! I usually take loads of stuff and never use it all. I took my A5 moleskine notebook I received as a birthday pressie last year, paints, selection of stamps, couple of masks and stencils and a bottle of autumn gold spray ink. The acrylic paint goes onto the paper in the moleskine book very differently to on watercolour paper. For some reason, maybe the hot sun didn't help, the paint doesn't move around much on the paper. This page has blues and reds and yellows on, then I decided to be brave and experiment and sprayed the autumn gold over, using the mask. I like the result, which was a bit of a relief!!