1000 Sheets Blog Candy

I know two post in one day.  I spoil you!!!

Anyhoo I spotted this on a blog I follow and thought I myself a chance of winning.  there is some amazing blog candy on offer so hop over to A Thousand Sheets of Paper and you too could be in with a chance of winning.

Journal Journeys Challenge #2

After taking codeine to help with my painful legs I went on-line and entered myself in the Journal Journeys Fairies Challenge.  I only knew about it when Dawn e-mailed me.  Thanks Dawn :)

For the challenge I decided to do a gel transfer of an image from a CD I've not used before called Victorian Angels and Fairies by Joanna Sheen.  Its not in circulation now sadly but has some fab images on it.  Dawn had used the gel transfer technique in her journal and it gave me the incentive to use it too.  I'd not used one in my journal before and managed to tear my first attempt.  For the second one I applied a bit thicker layer of gel and worked just fine.  I'm sure there'll be videos on YouTube showing how to do it so I won't bore you here ;)

Because the gel was thick the image turned out a little murky and grungy but I like that.  I then painted the back of the transfer with gesso to make the colours pop a little more.  I didn't want to do a pretty, pretty fairy page.  That's just not me.

I coloured the pages with charcoal grey and 2 colours of yellow Inktense Pencils and activated them with gesso - my fave technique at the moment!  I chose these colours to tie in with the image.

Next I Googled Fairy Poems and found this sweet little poem.  The image shows a lady steeping into a fairy ring and all of the fairies dancing and presumably (can't hear them lol!!!) singing.  I copied the poem into MS Word, changed the font and made it larger.  I then printed it out, coloured them with the same charcoal grey Inktense pencil as the background and activated it with gesso again.  I then cu the words up and stuck them to the page and went over the font with a black extra fine Sharpie pen.

I stamped various fairies from Elusive Images (now Chocolate Baroque) onto white sticky labels and cut them out and placed them on the page.  I have to thank Lesley W for showing me this technique.  I'm not that good at planning what I am gonna do with pages so this is sooo much easier than masking for me and means I can do things like these fairies and colour them in afterwards.  I used one of yellow Inktense pencils for their wings and used water to move the colour around.

So here you have it.  My Fairies Journal Page for the challenge on Journal Journeys.

Please join in even if you've never journaled before.  Its a great way to relieve stress can be done with just a few pencils / paints and an old exercise book.  I'll be back for the next one Dawn!

Elements of Art Journaling continued

Well I've done another 2 pages in the Elements of Art Journaling e-course I'm taking with Effy from Wild Precious Studios.  I am absolutely loving the course and I'm learning so much too!

The first page is for Air Week.  This week we had to practice free-writing around the idea of 'what I know for sure...'.  Free-writing is where you just sit for a certain lenth of time, in this case 15 minutes, and write whatever comes into your head.  Its a great technique if you're wrestling with solution to a problem as it can fall out of the free-writing.  The element of air is all about communication and words.  So of course me being me, I went down a different path from everyone else.  I looked at the other associations with air and discovered that smell and the colour yellow are associated.  As soon as I saw that the page came together easily.

Being a qualified aromatherapist, smell is very important to me and the first thing I thought of was lavender.  I used the free-writing as the background for the page, painted gesso over it and Claudine Hellmuth Yellow Pastel paint over that.  Once it was dry I rubbed Vaseline in parts over the page and painted Titan Buff over that.  Unfortunately I left it too long to rub the paint off the Vaseline and had to scratch some of it off ;)

I painted the lavender using Sheena Douglass' Paint Fusion technique.  For the other side of the page I left a portion in the middle unpainted and coloured it with a yellow Inktense Pencil and activated it with gesso to get a lovely pastel colour that I could write over.  The writing is my attempt at a poem-ish!!

The next week was Water Week which Effy gave us 2 weeks to complete as it is about our emotions and 'sitting with' the way we feel.  She suggested doing some writing about how we feel using water soluble pencils / crayons then painting a compassionate face over it and putting a loving sentiment on the page.  As I am suffering from depression this was going to be a step too far for me as I felt that it may drag me into the abyss I have been trying to get out of.

So I did an alternative page.  I did some 'sitting with it', but just to type out my problems.  Water is about 'daring' and 'dreaming', so this is what I did on my page.  I used lots of blue and green Inktense Pencils and activated them with gesso again to make the background.  I used the same pencils over the words and used water this time to activate them, then put twinkling H2O's over them.  I wanted the whole page to be irridescent. The bubbles are a tiny letter 'o' stamped in Golden Iridescent Gold paint. 

The Sea Horse is from Chocolate Baroque (previously Elusive Images) and I used it because they are very elegant, move so freely and ride the waves when they hit underwater. These are all things I struggle with. If a 'wave' hits me it'll knock me for six and moving freely is completely out of the question!

I am really happy with my page.  At some point I'll do the 'sitting with it' exercise, but not now.