Stencilgirl April 2019 Project

When the December 2018 Stencilgirl® Club stencils, called Fancy Houses, arrived, they made me feel quite nostalgic. They featured houses that could have stepped straight from the streets of Amsterdam, the city where I was once a student, now many moons ago. Of course I simply had to use them in one of my monthly projects for Stencilgirl® and this is the resulting 9 x 12" page I made.

 You can find a full step-by-step tutorial together with a list of the stencils I used on the Stencilgirl® Talk website.

If you fancy a trip April is a great time to visit The Netherlands as the bulb fields will be so colourful and within easy reach of the city.

Art Cards 333 - 341

Here is the next set of 9 art cards. Remember these cards are part of the #365somethings2018 project on Instagram, where I hope to end up with 365 cards, one for each day of 2018. If you want to see them appear individually each day, you can find them all on  my Instagram feed.

Stencilgirl November 2018 Project

I have been making many art cards this year (and that project isn't finished yet!). Occasionally however I suddenly get an urge to make art on a surface that is larger than 3 x 3"! Changing size in art making (also applies to quilts) gives you a new perspective and it also means you can use art supplies, specially stencils in this case, that are not so suitable for small backgrounds. The ladies on this journal spread are a perfect example of that. They feel very much at home on this 9 x 9" Bee Paper Mixed Media journal that I'm using for this art journalling spread that is my November project for Stencilgirl  Products®.

I was inspired by a quotation by William Wordsworth, that reads:"Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give, Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 

You can find a full step-by-step tutorial as well as a list of all the stencils I used for this spread, on the Stencilgirl® Talk site.

The Stencilfied Journal Prompt Nineteen

Prompt 19 of #thestencilfiedjournal project told us to stencil a page and write one word over and over. As you can see I used the word memories

The background of the page was made using the stencils from the September 2018 Stencilgirl®Club and I collaged on some pieces of a vintage music sheet as well as a piece of deli paper that had been printed previously on a gelli plate using stencil S290 Deconstructed Zinnia

I also sprayed on some gold Perfect Pearls Mist Sunflower Sparkle which sadly you can barely discern on the pictures but gives a very satisfying (to me) effect on the pages. I added some rubber stamping with the text Destination Unknown to combine with the memory words, as well as the text on the music sheet.

It makes sense to me and tells a story but it's open to whatever way you want to interpret it! As is all art.

Melancholy Sketchbook

Sometimes I am my own worst enemy in that I don't seem to be able to resist new projects and events. And temptation is all around on the internet!

I have been making yearly sketchbooks for The Sketchbook Project for more years than I care to remember but when their latest one popped up in my emails I promptly navigated to the site and that right finger just had to click the Buy button. I decided to combine this sketchbook with my monthly project as Guest Designer for Stencilgirl  Products® this September,as I have done before, so if you're interested you can follow a step-by-step tutorial for this journal on Stencilgirl®Talk site, together with a list of all the stencils I used.

The journal The Sketchbook Project sends you is sized 5 x 7" which I have to say is close to my ideal size for working in. I always undo the stapled binding and replace it with a sewn one for added stability.

The Sketchbook Project also provided us with a list of themes and once again I followed my first intuition and choose MELANCHOLY. Just because that was the mood I was in at the time.

Here are all the pages in the order they appear in the journal.

Yes, it will be hard to part with this one, as has been the case with all the other ones but of course I have the pictures on my hard drive and The Sketchbook Project also digitizes the sketchbooks you send them (for an additional cost). Plus the sketchbook gets to go off and travel further afield than The Brooklyn Art Library where it will eventually find a permanent home. Last year's one has already been to Toronto, Canada, Chicago, IL and it will be going to Atlanta, GA later this month.It has also been part of a summer residency at Governor's Island in NYC during the weekends in August.

Art Cards 41 - 49

My #365somethings2018 art card project continues and I'm almost at the stage where I can upload my daily 3 x 3" card on the day of the year it belongs too. That is what happens on my Instagram feed. Here on the blog you will be getting them in batches of nine whenever the opportunity arises.

Art Card 41

Art Card 42

Art Card 43

Art Card 44

Art Card 45

Art Card 46

Art Card 47

Art Card 48

Art Card 49

The Final Artmarks

You may remember that I participated in the #artmarks30daychallenge on Instagram recently. When that was finished I was left with 2 empty pages in the little journal I used for the challenge. Before putting it away I wanted to fill those pages and here they are.

I followed no particular prompt but stayed with adding lots of marks as you can see above. This challenge has definitely been good practice for me.

I used many techniques with stencilling being the most prominent one. All the stencils I used came from Stencilgirl Products.

This is the notebook/journal I used. It's by Clairefontaine, one of my most favourite notebooks suppliers, based in France, although their products are easily found all over the world. This one is sized 9 x 14cm. The plan was to paint the outside but I love the messy result of all that mark making and painting so I'm keeping it just like it is.

At some stage, hopefully soon, I'll do a flip through of the entire journal and post it on Instagram, so keep an eye out for that. You can follow me here.

More Artmarks

lettered

Here is the next lot of artmarks pages done in a small (3.5 x 5.5") art journal/notebook following the prompts provided by Rae Missigman. The prompts are written under each image. There are only a few more to go now and although I haven't managed to do all of them in the 30 days I have enjoyed making these small pages.  I'll share more with you when they are done. Somehow what with everything going on at the moment small projects suit me best. They can be done in small amounts of time here and there in between the general madness.

remnants

I used a wide variety of techniques and media. All the stencils used are by Stencilgirl Products.

found

tattered

collected

The above one with the prompt collected was done by gluing down a paper towel that had been used blotting up paints in previous artmarks. The gluing makes it very textural.

metallic

As always the metallic element is hard to photograph and that's why I have added a detail of this page below. I used a lot of metallic paints and also metallic glitter bits.

Tell the Truth

The prompt on Joggles Art Journal Adventures this week was: Hand. As luck would have it I already had a stencilled hand to hand so to speak, probably done as a try-out for a previous project. It uses L231 Tangled Tribal Hand Large stencil by Stencilgirl Products.  It became the focal point for this spread in an 6 x 8" art journal.

The background was done by first collaging on the pages with 7Gypsies tissue wrap, wrapping paper, vintage imagery and text as well as deli paper stencilled with the smallest stencil from the March 2017 Stencilgirl Club.

On top of that I used Distress Crayons as well as fluid acrylics with the L491 Organic Roots Large stencil, also from Stencilgirl Products.  The quotation was cut from a magazine some time ago, simply because I liked the words. I have a whole collection of such cuttings to use if and when they are appropriate. This one fitted the bill for this spread perfectly.

Here are a few detailed pictures on which you can see the various layers even better than on the relatively small pages.