Journal pages

I had a burst of creativity on Sunday in response to the stress of the inspection and managed 3 journal pages. The first one was about  the first film I remember seeing and how it was my Dad's favourite film. After stamping a background with various stamps I doodled the vines and roughly coloured them with pro markers. My next page was about coincidence and after applying TH inks and distress stains in Worn Lipstick and Wild Honey I used Dylusions pomegranate ink to spray through a stencil and reverse print the stencil.

 I then stamped TH butterflies and bird ready for my journalling. I had a lot to say this time and needed to leave enough space for the journalling.

 The journalling is about a man we met in Canada who had previously bought a picture from Lens Guy to take to a relative in Vancouver. We met him in a gift shop as we were wasting time as our ferry to Vancouver Island was delayed.

Last page is all about inspiration which I get from Dyan Reaveley, Tim Holtz, Wendy Vechii, nature and all the wonderful blogs and forums that I follow, visit and drop by.

I stamped TH swirl with worn lipstick and then embossed with Ultra thick powder, swiped with worn lipstick and milled lavender. I used the fab stamps from Dependable Dotty and Lovestruck Lucy and journalled around the images. 

AWOL but here's a rare scrapping layout

I have been AWOL as the inspectors are coming to school and under pressure at work to have everything  perfect and could you just write up that and this and... Just finished a 70 hour week this week - not something I want to do again. As our leader said when trying to inspire us..."They'll find what they find." Very profound and this was followed by, "It will be over by Christmas!" Stopping at that point would have been fine but our leader then asked the history teacher if that was the correct phrase for the WW1. With a passion rarely heard the reply was, "And they were wrong and it was followed by 4 years of attrition, destruction and the troops were decimated." To be quite honest I would rather they just turned up without notice as my teaching would be the same, my classroom would just be a little messy and my filing a little behind.
Anyway back to scrapping. I took last Saturday off and spent the day with the fab crew at EK Craft and Crop - lots of chat, laughter and some creating. I even managed some Christmas cards too.

 I borrowed the TH Tattered Floral die at the crop to make the layered flowers, chipboard butterflies   from Tando were inked and the floral paper had been in my stash forever and just had been to be torn to make it less pretty. I also used an acetate overlay I have had for years. The photo is of our middle daughter the weekend our youngest daughter was born. Their aunt had spent hours entertaining the four of them with face painting etc so they did not feel jealous of their little sister - but that has never been a problem. Middle daughter loves bugs, birds and the outside so the butterflies and robin seemed appropriate. The flowers and everything else have liberal applications of ink and doodles.

The journalling is on a tag tucked into the semi circle. I can see that art journalling does influence my scrapping layouts as I had no fear doodling a border around the photo and the letters and a few more flowers. The metal butterfly used to be on one of the girls shoes and I rescued it when the shoes were being thrown out.

Journalling Aargh and Just for Fun Challenge

The challenge at JFF was to use your favourite colour, for those that pop in here regularly you'll know that for me it is green closely followed by purple. I choose green as it is a happier colour and I was trying to rid myself of the negative thoughts. I had been experimenting in my new journal with gesso and distress stains and created this checked background a few weeks ago. Yesterday feeling stressed to exploding point about work I decided to journal on the background and unusually for me I worked out and wrote the journalling first.

I drew round a cd three times and pencilled in my writing and then wrote it on the page using a pro marker. I feel like a headless chicken at the moment so using dylusions stamps (Lovestruck Lucy, Ruby Rainbow and Dependable Dotty)I stamped three heads and used the umbrella stamp to create spokes. 

I coloured the heads with a paintbrush and Distress inks and then stamped the Dylusions circle stamp to give more circular energy. As  you can see below Dependable Dotty has a strong influence over me at the moment.

I swiped more Distress Ink and some picket fence ink stain over the top. The distress inks are the Winter release (yes I gave in and bought them). Writing how I felt did make me feel better and helped get some of that screaming out my head. I then went to get my hair cut and I had a bit of a drastic change - influence I think, by my stamping and colouring of Dependable Dotty...

A major chop and lots of red, violet and aubergine. I think I like it but my son did comment that I was going a bit emo - you can always rely on family to say the right thing...

And here is another journal page on the theme of bitrhdays for UKStampers.

Just For Fun Art Journal Page

The challenge at Just for Fun was to use your favourite stamp. My current favourite is Dependable Dotty by Dylusions as I just love the versatility and quirky feel of it. I have fallen behind again in the journal prompts at UK Stampers so typically I went for the last one, number 43. Am I social? Yes and No. With close friends I will let my hair down and have fun. If I have to meet new people I curl up inside with fear but usually you cannot tell as the more nervous I am the louder I become.

The background had many layers of dylusions paint, ink, gesso and stencil and more ink before I liked it but then it was quite dark. I did stamp Dotty straight onto the page and coloured her lighter but did not like it. I stamped her onto black paper and embossed with silver pearl and coloured with some aqua pro markers. I wanted a cartoon type feel to this image so did very basic colouring. The picture below shows what it was like before I coloured her and I'm not sure which one I prefer.

The other image had Dotty's other head and an image from a music magazine I cut out, gessoed over and then painted, journaled and doodled on. We were meant to include an invite so I made a tag describing my invitation to social hell. I felt it still needed something so punched some butterflies with the Tonic punch and used waste paper with ink spray spatters to back the butterflies.

Thank you for popping by.

Stampotique Altered Poison Bottle

At Stampotique Maria challenged us to alter a bottle to a poison bottle and only use Stampotique stamps... hmmm... much thinking ensued. Here is the almost step by step approach, it just leaves out the  swearing, smiling and general messiness that went on. 

I began with an empty perfume stick bottle which I filled with  sploshes of alcohol inks and gold mixatives but I found it hard to get it to go where I wanted it to go.

I coloured the lid with pro markers and alcohol inks and doodled some details on the lid with sakura white and glitter pens. It is a poison bottle but it also needs an antidote which I created and stuck to one of the perfume sticks.

In my bits and bobs box I found an old dried chilli and that seemed a great antidote to poison when wrapped with beads, ribbons, pin and the definition of antidote. I had to really think about how to get the stamping on and then staring at the glass bottle inspiration stuck - shrink plastic. There was a lot of unladylike cursing at this point as bits curled over too much and got stuck etc but I finally ended up with these pieces edged in alcohol ink.

Angel Boy, Oh Deer, Smushasha and Olivia (Eric had a major melt down and curl up)

I decided the bottle needed a stand so found the plastic protector from a stack of cd's added ink and stuck on some metal fasteners as feet. If I had taken photos in daylight you could appreciate how giving the bottle a base that is raised up helps the colours bounce. I then stuck my shrink plastic stamps to the bottle with glue, masking tape, glue dots, tape and more swearing as a curvy bottle and wavy shrink plastic make it tricky to stick. I also added another layer of ink to my shrink plastic.

Olivia perhaps suffering from Poison?

Angel Boy hiding under what began as a hideous flowery chipboard tag  before I covered it in gesso,  inks and my drawing of a wonky skull and crossbones - and another bead from that box.

  

Here you can see the shrink plastic poison charm above Oh Deer and a key and owl charm that were dipped in alcohol inks and added to the sign.

The curved bits hanging from ribbon on each corner are from a broken shell necklace in my bits and bobs box that I dripped red ink onto to make them look a little like blood. I enjoyed making this. I hope you enjoyed reading about it.