Listen to Your Inner Voice

Some time ago I started work on one of the lessons from the Fall 2015 21 Secrets series of classes (now no longer available but a new series of classes is coming up soon). It was the class by Robin Kalinich and I worked on it in my large vintage ledger art journal (size of a double spread = 16 x 22"). I had come to a bit of a stop with it when up popped the newest week 11 prompt for Colour Me Positive. It was: Intuition. And the art challenge was: use an animal somewhere on your page.

What I had done so far in my ledger already had several birds and butterflies on it and the words: "Listen to Your Inner Voice" rose up in my mind almost immediately I started thinking about finishing the spread for this week's Colour Me Positive.

This was a wonderful example of synchronicity and the spread came together beautifully after I geared to towards the prompt.

As this was a class I won't give you a lot of info about how I started off but I will say that the birds and butterflies all come from vintage books. I used stencils from Stencilgirl Products in the background as follows: the words come from the Mixed Media stencil (designed by Carolyn Dube) and I also used the Kilim stencil (by Cathy Nichols).

The title was stamped on using a metallic stamp pad. Then for no good reason other than that I happened to come across it while locating that metallic pad I finished off my pages with Special Effect Wax by Liberon, colour Verdigris. I had completely forgotten I had these waxes (and have no idea now how or why I obtained them) but I love the effect they had on these pages. The colour looks wonderful,  the wax has added a lovely smell to the pages and they are now completely smooth and don't stick together. The wax has sealed in the acrylic paint completely so it's fair to say I will be using these again.

The Bravest Moment

The spread I'm showing you today is a combination of two different classes. First of all it has been made for Wanderlust 2016 where we are making a spread in our art journals twice a month inspired by a prompt. For this week that prompt was: the bravest moment of my life. The clue for when that was as far as I am concerned, is the date shown at bottom right. I may not have been aware of my bravery at the time but looking back I am amazed at myself. The spread is done in a Vintage Vanity Art Journal and the size for each page is 5 x 7".

The spread itself was inspired by a class from 21 Secrets Fall 2015 Edition now no longer available but a new class will start in April) and the lesson was by Jes Belkov Gordon. I made a wee mistake as I had watched the videoed lesson some days before making the pages and only remembered I had to use something water soluble for the background (which would then form the circles) and used water soluble oil pastels. It looked great but of course resisted my attempts to put paint on top. I redid the background, this time with the Inktense blocks as per the class and that worked a lot better even though I was still forced to add gesso to my paint to give it a bit more grip.

On the plus side it meant that some of the colour of the background can still be seen in the gessoed/painted areas. Of course I was always going to love a class involving circles and specially one that also reminded me of a bubble quilting pattern.

I added the date and some writing around the circles commemorating my bravest moment!

It's surprising just how often bravery, courage etc. pops up in prompts on various creative groups, not just at the moment but overall. It must mean we all need to keep reminding ourselves! I certainly feel the same way as witnessed by the fact that my word for 2015 was COURAGE.

I have a Secret Journal

As I have mentioned before here I did the 21 Secrets online course this year and the time that the course is up online is almost over so I have been looking at most of the videos again just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. It also reminded me that there are various of the projects I started in these classes, that I haven't shared here yet. One of them is the journal I made in Terri Kahrs' class and that's because it is a work in progress. It lives in a box in my studio together with all the items I still want to add to it and when I have an idle moment (not often!) I do some more work here. The whole idea is that if you're journalling you might want to keep some words to yourself only and the course concentrated on ways to hide those words from others.
Above is the front cover and the title I gave my journal: Art Play. The picture is of me, many, many moons ago!

One of the things I loved about this journal was that it enabled me to use all those treasures I keep on gathering, such as photographs, images cut from magazines, cards I particularly liked, rubber stamps, washi tape (now there is a collection and I keep on buying more!) and the like. I combine them and then tip them into the journal as shown above. Please note that the one thing I haven't done a lot of yet here is actual journalling as after that I tend to keep my journals to myself, secret hiding places or not!
Here you can see several of my favourite things such as Venetian masks, the artist Frida Kahlo and that ubiquitous washi tape.

The backgrounds were done with watercolour and gelato sticks as well as stamping. My habit of hanging on to cards that I like came in ever so handy for this class. The multi coloured flower at top left was done following the Flower Power segment in 21 Secrets, by Ro Bruyn. It uses the patterned inside of envelopes.

The item on the left is a flap, only attached at the top, that can be lifted and secrets can be written underneath!

 Above some more examples of favourite cards. Sometimes I even buy them specially!

This page is still quite virginal and by the time I'm eventually finished with it I expect it to have much more going on there. On the right is one of my own photographs while the image on the left comes from a catalogue.

Above another tipped in envelope that has been stamped extensively, another Ro Bruyn flower and a picture of a detail from one of my quilts called Of Immortality. There will be a lot more going on in this journal till I finally decide to call it done, probably when it becomes too thick to add more. I loved this class because it offered me an opportunity to use some of my massive stash of all kinds of everything!

There will be a new 21 Secrets class next year, this time in the shape of an e-book that you can keep forever, rather than having to do the class in the allotted time span of 1 year. I've already signed up despite worrying slightly about the digital size of that e-book. I'll deal with that when the time comes, I'm sure.

Another Art Journal

I have finished another of the 21 Secrets 2013 classes. It was the Go Green; Art Journaling with Recycling by Rae Missigman. I used a vintage issue (printed in the 19th Century) of the Robinson Crusoe book Written by Himself as the title page states. As we all now know this Himself was in fact Daniel de Foe or Defoe. It wasn't in a great condition and in hindsight I would have been better using a more solid book. Having said that the rest of the process worked very well on this book. It's just that the binding is a bit weak as you can see in the detail below.

The rest of the book is hardly recognizable at all with only the inside pages still recognizable as coming from the original book. Once I start covering these pages with gesso and start to art journal on them, they too will no longer look like they belong to the original book. As you can see the cover has been altered using  many layers of gesso, acrylics, inks etc. and if you want to know all the individual stages you can still sign up for the 21 Secrets 2013 yourself. The classes will be available till the end of December this year.

For the strips of fabric around the cover I used cut-offs from the layered pieces I use to check out my stitching tension and stitches used on my machine quilted quilts. I cut the edges with a special rotary cutter that has that wave pattern you can see above, and for the closure I used sari yarn.

There is a great deal less decoration on mine than on Rae Missigman's example as I found that simply a bit too much of a good thing. It's great to complete another most enjoyable class which taught me more about adding layers, using gesso and coptic stitching.

Dos-a-Dos Handmade Books

The back to back journal in among the daisies

 

I signed up for the 21 Secrets 2013 online art journalling classes. It's a series of classes by different tutors which will remain accessible till the end of this year once you have paid your subscription fees. There is a sale on for this project for the month of July so a good time to give it a go if you're interested. $49 dollars is a small price to pay and I would have been quite happy to pay that just for the Dos-a-Dos videos.There is a wide variety of classes to choose from and I have done quite a few of them already such as the Sparkle-Arkle one (of course!!). But the one that so far has stolen my heart is the Dos-a-Dos (French for back to back) handmade book one by Roben-Marie Smith. So clearly explained and with a gorgeous end-product that proved irresistible to me.

It starts with instructions on how to paint a 9 x 12 page that will be used as the base of the book. I went ahead and made 2 just in case one didn't work out well. I have to admit that because I do this in my painting shed where there is no electricity I tried to remember as much of what Roben-Marie said on the video as possible and then in the shed tried to recall and do it all. In the end I simply went with what felt right to me and these 2 pages above and below were the result.

I could not begin to tell you just what I all used but it did include lots more stencils than Roben-Marie used in her pieces. I just love that spray paint!

Then I proceeded to make two Dos-a-Dos books following Roben-Marie excellent video instructions as well as two examples of the Bonus Project she also added to her class. They use the remnants of the items used for the larger book such as the bottom bit of a paper bag and copies of your painted pages. You can see these little beauties above. They make an ideal size of sketchbook to put into a handbag.

Here is the front (with button closure) of one of my books

And this is the other side. The journal can thus be opened from both sides and each side has a separate signuture of watercolour pages inside.

You can see how it works a bit better on the above picture where the upright book is spread out. It looks like this from the other side too.
Enough said! I recommend you sign up for class without delay if you like this project. I can't wait to discover other gems of classes included in the 21 Secrets 2013 during the coming months (although they might have to wait a bit till the weather outside isn't quite so lovely).

PS for some reason Blogsy has published this with Thursday's date, probably because that's when I wrote the text. The pictures were added today. Will try and remedy the situation once I'm on my mainframe computer. And as you can see, that worked!

 

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