Mother's Day

Mother's Day Card

I rounded the cardstock with the corner punch and stamped the sentiment.  The flowers stamp is from magenta and I used Letraset Tria markers to colour the images, and Glossy Accents to highlight them.  All the orange card/paper is offcut.  I recycled a mandarine bag from the supermarket to give a bit more texture to the image.

Ingredients for Mother's Day Card
Clarity stamps cardstock with rounded corners by Woodware corner punch
Flowers stamp from Magenta
Woodware Francoise Read 'Tiny Phrases' sentiment
Distress Inks in spiced marmalade
Staedtler triplus fineliner in orange
Letraset Tria markers: yellow Y156, green G356, blue C555
Inkssentials Glossy Accents
Art Glitter adhesive

Shabby Clothes

Shabby chic...not

 

Efemera from UK Stampers says: 

"This week your prompt is FASHION

1 What was/is your fashion disaster and what was/is your favourite piece?

2 Use some fabric on your page

3 Use a picture from a magazine"

I really should re-read these prompts before I start work.  Suffice to say, I forgot that I was meant to be using a picture from a magazine.  I think the story behind the page is probably self-evident and the words were still stinging in my ears when I read the fashion prompt.  Like the rest of the country, we've been through a period where cash has been a bit tight and I guess I'd been doing more make do and mend than I realised.  That said, if a young boy gets a tear in the knees of otherwise perfectly serviceable trousers, surely it makes sense to repair the tear, especially if you know for a fact that the next time they play football there is bound to be another scrape and tear?  This is probably the first journal page that made me feel a little sad as I worked on it, but it was cathartic and I'm done with it.

Ingredients for Shabby Clothes

Fashion collage stamp by Tim Holtz for Stampers Anonymous

Distress ink in 'vintage photo'

Letraset Tria markers (used on the stamped image): red R345, green G356, orange O567, yellow Y337, brown O346

Steadtler triplus fineliners: tan, orange, raspberry, green

Recycled cotton sheet fabric

Pity and Mercy

Sméagol

Efemera from UK Stampers says:

"This week's prompt is BOOKS

1 List your top five books...what and why?

2 Use a quote from one of them on your page

3 Use an old book page as your background"

I imagine my favourite book to be a favourite of quite a few people.  'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy by J R R Tolkien is such a hugely rich book in terms of characters and environments that you almost can't imagine that it is a work of fiction.  It feels so real you can almost feel the pages of the book breathing and I feel equally passionate about the Hugh Jackman movies.  The other books I chose, I chose for similar reasons.  The 'Harry Potter' series by J K Rowling, 'The Liveship Traders' trilogy by Robin Hobb and the 'Dragonlance Chronicles' by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman all have wonderful fantasy backgrounds against which important stories, that might otherwise be too cruel, can be read by adults and by children also.  I have added 'The Unlikely Ones' by Mary Brown as this is the first fantasy novel I read, at about nine or ten and I still own the book.  My mother liked the beautifully drawn cover and I was drawn in by tales of sickly dragons, disabled heroes and heroines and a knight in rusting armour.  

If I could have added more books, I would have dipped into my other favourite genres:

Horror and ghost stories - 'The Stand' by Stephen King and works by H P Lovecraft and Henry James

Sci-fi - 'The Player of Games' by Iain M Banks

Short stories - Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl and just about EVERYTHING that Daphne du Maurier has ever written

Anyways, back to journalling.  I couldn't bare to part with a single page of any of my books, so I took a photograph of a page from The Two Towers and printed it out.  I drew Sméagol/Gollum having looked at some of the pictures on the internet and coloured him with Letraset Tria markers and Steadtler triplus fineliners, discovering as I did so that I could do with a wider selection of skin tones.  I should have started using coloured pencils at that stage, but I didn't want to change the texture/look of the drawing.  The quote is one of my favourites in the book, forcing the reader to examine their own feelings towards Gollum, who was once Sméagol, and remains a creature still worthy of pity and mercy.

I filled in the names and authors of the other books around the drawing.  I could have been neater, but against the typeface, I wanted a slightly more "scruffy" look.  Lastly, I doodled lines in similar colours to the background paper, to make the quotes, title, image and background paper more unified.

Ingredients for Pity and Mercy

Background paper - free with magazine

Staedtler pigment liner 03

Pentel Chinese Calligraphy brush pen

Pentel white gel pen

Staedtler triplus fineliners: light grey, dark grey

Letraset Metallic markers: silver, red gold

Letraset Tria markers: whites WG07 and WG10, skin tones O518, O618, O527, pink R327, brown O225, blues C555, C919, B138, raspberry R354, green G356, black XB

Quick Make - Teabags

Teabags

These are just quick makes.  Sometimes I just want to experiment with different colour schemes, so I used these "tea or coffee?" morning invites to do just that.  

I used a glass desert bowl to draw the circle around the stamps, coloured everything in, backed with contrasting paper and decorated with gel pens.  To give a tiny bit of movement to the cards, the teabag is hung by a turquoise thread from the sentiment.

Ingredients for Teabags

Anita's cards - readymade, but halved using guillotine

Daler Rowney Manga Pad paper

Papers free with magazine or offcuts
Woodware Francoise Read "Making Time" clear stamps

Letraset Metallic markers: gold, red gold

Letraset Tria Markers: yellow Y337, green G136, blues C528 and C555, pink (old style) Pantone 184-T

Staedtler triplus fineliner in orange

Gel pens (various makes and colours)

Purple

Grandma

 Wider view of pages

Efemera from UK Stampers says "This week your prompt is COLOUR

1 What is your favourite colour and why?

2 Use this as your main background for your page

3 Add a doodled border to your page"

Grandma was my mother's mother.  Even in her eighties she was one of the most beautiful women in my life.  In her heyday, and standing at 5ft 7ins, she was as graceful and glamourous as any model or film star of that era.  She loved horror movies and the colour purple, and I have inherited both of these traits from her.

I took a photograph of a photograph I have of her.  Since my favourite colours are both purple and green, I chose background paper with both of these represented.  I used a corner punch on the paper and the photograph.  The rose, the wings, the title font and the chain and squares on the opposite page are all stamps.  I stamped these in a light colour and then re-coloured them all with Letraset Tria markers and gel pens.  The leaf doodles to the right of the photographs were hand drawn in the style of the rose and coloured in the same way to maintain consistency.  

The title font is made up of Woodware's Francoise Read "Francoise Alphabet" clear stamps.  I love this font and actually have three sets of the stamps to ensure that I can (nearly always) set up a whole phrase in one stamp, rather than having to stamp the letters indiviudally.  I have used gold dots everywhere, but these have not shown up especially well in the photographs.  As the page was important to me, I used the remainder background paper on the opposite page, onto which I added the poem about Arthur (a photograph of the original script).  To me, these pages honour people whom I have loved and lost.

Ingredients for Purple

DCWV Floral Prints background paper

Photograph of a photograph of Grandma

Woodware rounded corner punch

Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz angel wings stamp

Hobby Art Surrey Stylised Rose

Distress Ink in "tattered rose"

Woodware Francoise Read "Glasgow Glass Elements" clear stamps

Woodware Francoise Read "Francoise Alphabet" clear stamps

Letraset Metallic marker in gold

Letraset Tria markers: pink O518, purples V528 and V245, greens G136 and G356

Zebra Jimnie gel pen in silver

Gold glitter gel pen (make unknown)

Pentel white gel pen

Staedtler triplus fineliners in dark blue and purple

Secret postcards

Caught stealing an egg

Art Deco lady

My younger son's school is fundraising at present and has used the Royal College of Art's idea of having a secret postcard sale.  Ideally, they'd like known artists or celebrities to contribute cards, but were asking anyone who could pick up a pencil to have a go.  These were my contributions.  They lady should/could have been more delicate, but the markers bled slightly more than I was expecting on the postcard paper.  By the time I drew the fox, I was anticipating this, so I used a Chinese brush pen and rather than trying to include more detail, I just tried to make fewer lines work harder by varying the thicknesses.  My inspiration was Art Deco postcard work, as those artists gave such expression in few lines and fewer colours.

Ingredients for Caught stealing an egg

Pentel Chinese calligraphy brush pen

Letraset Tria marker in orange O567
Pentel white gel pen for highlights in eyes; other white areas are just the white of the card

Ingredients for Art Deco lady

Steadtler triplus fineliner in brown

Letraset Tria markers: red R766, blue V245, orange O567 and skin tone O729

2012 Art Journal, Week 6 - Friends

Friends

 Efemera from UK Stampers says:

"This week your prompt word is FRIENDS

1 Who, when where?

2 What is your most memorable 'friend' story?

3 Use some kind of stencil decoration on your page"

The stencilled panel at the top left started this page.  It reminded me of sunshine on grass and an occasion when a friend invited me over to stay in Holland and work on a horse therapy farm for a week.  When I look back, I still see it as a bright gem attached to some very dark cloth.  It enabled me to give some perspective to the events that I was going through at the time.

I wanted the page to be reminiscent of hard work outdoors in bright sunshine, with slightly scorched grass, dry sand schools and slightly skittish horses with snorting noses and warm, dusty flanks.

Ingredients for Friends

Sunflower stencil (origin unknown)

Anita's horse stamp

Blade Rubber Stamps horse stamp

Sunflower stamp (origin unknown)

Distress ink in 'spiced marmalade' and 'vintage photo'

Letraset Tria markers: greens G136 and G356, brown O346, orange O567

Letraset Metallic markers in silver and gold

Zebra Jimnie gel pens in silver and gold