Inspiration Board

Week 12 of Journal 52 - so far so good! This week is a chance to journal about inspiration. Where do you find yours?

Inspiration is everywhere for me, take it from all around and all you do. Life, travel, love, friendship, family... I didn't want to do a collage of clippings, but share my inspiration through my photography, drawings, paintings and abstract painting for the  background.

I started by creating a torn paper background, using coloured scrapbooking papers. This got covered with a layer of Gesso applied with a palette knife in a random manner. Structure gel pressed through a harlequin stencil added raised elements. Once thoroughly dry, random brushings of distress inks in blue and brown picked out the textures and shapes. I added a rainbow of dribbles with distress inks and put to one side to consider my imagery for the top layer.

 

I decided to use brown craft tags and apply images on the top. I used image transfer, painted and drew three things that inspire me, created a word cloud from stickers and created a frame with metal charm wings in. I found some rub-ons and added a few onto the background to emphasise the images I drew. I finished by adding a title, butterflies, arrow and metal cogs.

 

The final journal layout:

I hope you find your inspiration this week!

Just Write

This weeks prompt for Journal 52 mulled around my head for a while! It took me time to figure out how I wanted to approach this one. There is so much you could do with words - words are great, writing is a great release in so many ways.

I have a great old typewriter and wanted to feature this within my page, so I photographed it on my polaroid camera and put to one side to tackle the page... I tore up old book pages and layered to create my background, adding distress ink on the top by rubbing the pad over, and stamping a few random background images. On top I added white gesso with a palette knife, making textures in the surface & used a script stencil to create raised sections. Once dry I sprayed some distress ink and let it drip down the page. Layering acrylic paint and ink on top of this to link the two sides. I finished by layering the photographs, a stamped image and the title. I was rather stained blue, brown and red myself once finished! It's great to get messy.

Enjoy your week. Have fun getting messy too.

Colouring Book Inspiration

Week 10 for Journal 52 is taking inspiration from colouring books. I was never very good at that, I always wanted to draw my own thing, and keeping to the lines? So frustrating! So my journal page for this piece is my own doodle, taking inspiration from spring and a variety of different illustrations I have come across on my travels of the internet! Then I coloured outside the lines too!

I drew in pencil first then went over the outline with a fine line pen, adding in the detail that I wanted and coated this with masking fluid. Using watercolours I painted outside the lines to build the background.

Once this was dry I removed the masking fluid - and nearly cried! It took the top layer of paper off and most of my drawing! I had to re-draw the whole thing - grrrrrrr...... So I was definitely colouring outside the lines! To finish, I then added a little touch of colour inside the lines of the blossom and leaves and finished with a few flicks of paint over the top.

I had fun creating this piece. Go create and colour outside the lines! Have a great week everyone.

Street Art

Over at Sunday Postcard Art this week is the theme of Street Art. I have a thing for this, I love looking out for it and photographing great examples I come across. Some people hate it and see it as just vandalism, but I think there is a place for it, give the artists room to create and you will get some amazing artistic pieces. Just 'tagging' your name is not art, but creating a beautiful painting on a wall - that takes skill.

Creating art with spray paint is not as easy as it looks - trust me, I've tried it! We had some artists come into school to teach our students in a designated area - they were amazing, the rest of us just dabbled by comparison! In my book, as long as you make the wall or space look better, how does it do harm? A plain wall or an amazing portrait? Animal? Landscape scene?

I so enjoyed this theme and my postcard is inspired by an artist called Tim Marrs. He is a British illustrator, and his work is mainly digital, but has a great street feel to it. My piece was created with chalk paint backgrounds in grey with a hot pink dry brush area and stencilled chevrons in lime green. I dried with a heat gun to bubble and distort the paint. I added an orange stripe then stamped the wings. These are the best free stamps I have had, from Craft Stamper. Then I drew in the body and filled with black. I added a little distressing with white and dark brown dragged and blended over the top to finish.

Happy creating!

Artistic Restraint...

Artistic Restraint? As soon as you tell me I can't do something, I want to do the complete opposite! So completing the prompt for Journal 52 this week did not come easily.

One colour, one shape...

Colour, that's the easy bit - shades of blue. Shape - circles. But I wanted a third element. For me, artistically things work better as odds, not evens. The placement of three items is more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, your brain sees it differently to evenly numbered items. With evens you want to group or pair them together, they have to be symmetrical and evenly spaced. Odds means more freedom as you automatically can't pair them up! So I had a to add a few lines in too, to balance the page. What do you think?

I started by die cutting a range of circles, used them as a template and dribbled distress ink around them and up the page in lots of rivers of colour. This took an age to dry! Then I used the holes from the circles I cut as stencils and added others using different shades of blue. Then I die cut circles from patterned paper, distressed and layered on top. Then out came the pens - scribbling around the circles and adding the lines on top. The straight lines weren't quite enough to balance the page, so I added a few 'zig-zag' lines around three circles (see, the odd number again!) and added a title around the larger circle. A few gems stuck on, sprays of blue ink and white paint and I'm done. I think. I keep coming back to it as I'm not quite convinced...

Head on over to have a look at some other great examples and inspiration. Have a great week!