Inspiration exists

Week 2 2017 brought the prompt: Discipline for Colour Me Positive 2017 and it afforded me the opportunity to use one of my favourite art quotation by Pablo Picasso: "Inspiration exists but it has to find you working". 

It also provided a chance to incorporate his painting Les Demoiselles d:Avignon  (1907) on my art journal page (I'm working in the A4 Dylusions art journal). It remains astonishing to me that I saw this for myself last year in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.  I also added an image from a sketch Picasso did showing the artist and his model.

For the background and almost all the stencilling I used the L185 Unfinished stencil designed by Seth Apter for Stencilgirl Products.  It is amazingly versatile and filled to the brim with different patterns as well as words. It was augmented by words from Donna Downey's stencil  068 I am an Artist.

 The words of the quotation were stamped on using the new alphabet stamp set designed by Everything Art for PaperArtsy. They were outlined with a white marker.

The Power

The first prompt for 2017 on Colour Me Positive 2017 was: Power. I know I mentioned I wasn't going to continue with CMP but somehow I seem to  have grasped my art journal (A4 Dylusions) and set to, probably encouraged by the fact that I won a pack of collage papers for my contribution in week 53. It's winging it's way to me from Australia! The other factor is that sometimes I just want to immerse myself in art journalling. In any case I found a great quotation by Joseph Stalin: "I believe in one thing only: the power of human will". Stalin wasn't a man who lived up to his own quotations much but this one has always spoken to me, regardless of the person who said it.

I used collage with a magazine image, vintage text, wallpaper segments and postage stamps (from the USSR, of course!).

 The background was done with stencilling using L450 Fantasia stencil by Stencilgirl and rubber stamping with the Circles and Dots stamp from Carabelle Studio. Acrylic ink was dripped down the pages as well.

 The text was rubber stamped too using an alphabet set apart from the word POWER, which is collaged.

I'm coming to the end of this particular art journal so the pages are not lying quite flat any more hence the photography on the slant!

Opportunities

The very last prompt on Colour Me Positive for 2016 was: Opportunities. I found a quotation by Eric Roth which resonated with me. It reads: "Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss". It seemed rather appropriate for the start of a New Year.

I made the background by using just one stencil from Stencilgirl Products. It is L457 Santiago, designed by Nathalie Kalbach. I used the same stencil to print up some deli paper on my gelli plate and used pieces of the resulting prints as collage on the pages (the black/blue bits). I found an appropriate image from a magazine and I also used paper with Chinese script for additiona collage material as well as 3 French postage stamps. The quotation itself was printed out onto vintage paper using my computer. I also used a small rubber stamp of an ink splat on the pages. It was produced by Stampotique.

 Acrylic ink were dropped on the pages and encouraged to drip in various directions.

I used outlining with black and white lines to emphasize some design elements. 

I have been working in the A4 sized Dylusions art journal for all my Colour Me Positive prompts this year. There are still some pages left to fill and as I like to have my journals completed I will continue adding spreads although not necessarily with Colour Me Positive inspired work. The project is continuing but I'm not going to do it every week as was the case in 2016. In 2017 I will only do them if a particular prompt inspires a direct response. I'm reigning back on projects so that I can concentrate on developing my own work and use my own inspiration.

The Magic of Christmas

The Colour Me Positive prompt for this week is, of course, Christmas. I indulged in making it as nostalgic and sentimental as possible and am surprisingly pleased with the result. It has a little bit of everything: a Father Christmas who looks very much like Sinterklaas (a Dutch tradition), there are 4 Scandinavian horses (dala) present as well as a quintessentially British village with a traditional coach arriving. The pages sparkle with metallic paints (hard to see, I know!) and it looks like it is all taking place in a mysterious forest. The christmas tree is an unadorned evergreen, which is how I like them best. Of course, there is also a hint of snow.

In the background I used L451 It's a Jungle Out There stencil by Stencilgirl Products and the white leafy bits hanging done from the top come from the S078 Flowers Version 1. Both were designed by Cecilia Swatton. Her stencils are so versatile.

 The stars in black and gold come from the EEA04 stamp set designed by Everything Art for PaperArtsy

All the collage elements originated in a lifestyle magazine. It's hard to capture the sparkle and shine,  but by tilting the album and taking the above picture I hope you get the idea.

I want to wish everyone a very happy holiday, whatever you may be celebrating! It's going to be a wet and windy one here in the Scottish Borders but we will be celebrating Flora's first Christmas with us and that is enough fun for anyone.

A Flower Just Blooms

The latest prompt on Colour Me Positive 2016 was about Competing or Comparing Yourself to Others. I found a lovely quotation by Zen Shin that says: "A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms".  That was a good excuse to get out a flower stencil and spray away. Rather than using paint I only applied colour spraying through that stencil with DecoArt Media Misters in a variety of colours as well as white.

Once it had all dried I chose a vintage image of one of my most favourite flowers: the ox-eye daisy, and added it to the page with matte medium. I also used some text about this flower for the collage. I added rubber stamping and stamping with an art foamie (see below for a list of where all the supplies came from).

 After dripping yellow acrylic ink down the pages and glueing on pieces of an alphabet themed washi tape,  I added the text with an old alphabet stamp set (unbranded) and outlined it with a white marker. The final addition were self adhesive little stickers of bees and a flower.

 Techniques used: spraying through a stencil, collage, rubber stamping and stamping with art foamie.

Materials used: L307 Floral 1 Stencilgirl stencil, rubber stamps from the DDRS004 Full Bloom Vol. 2 set by Darkroom Door, Writers Block art foamie, designed by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer for Artfoamies, vintage image and text from the book British Wild Flowers, by Professor Henslow, 1910.

Something Creative

The Colour Me Positive challenge has been taken over by someone else as LuLu Art was sold to a new owner. This was one of the things I intended to stop doing in 2017 to make room for other activities and my heart sort of sank when our challenge this week was revealed as: New Beginnings. As you may remember we had the same prompt on The Documented Life Project not too long ago. However I had recently filled a 5 x 8" (13 x 21 cm) Moleskine Sketchbook Notebook using it as a repository of left over paints and sprays, stamps and stencils, simply because it seemed too wasteful not to. Now that all the pages have backgrounds I decided to go one step further and make a spread on those pages. This is the first one, somewhere in the middle of the sketchbook.

I can't tell you exactly what I did on the backgrounds as I simply kept adding things as and when the opportunity arose, and I have long forgotten the details.

 I do know that the little flowers came from a stencil designed by Tamara Laporte for Artist Cellar.

I also managed to find a quotation I hadn't used before, referring to new beginnings. It reads: "My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life". (Miles Davis)

I haven't decided yet whether or not to finish Colour Me Positive this year. I guess it depends on the prompts in the remaining weeks till the end of this year.

Transform the World

Today is my 6th anniversary of blipping which means that for six years I have posted a daily picture on the Blipfoto site without interruptions. Not just that but I have enjoyed every minute of my blip adventure. Finding a picture was easier on some days than others but it has never been difficult. I love having a camera in my hand, both to take pictures of the garden, where we live, where I go and there is always my art too. What I am finding more and more difficult is keeping up with all my friends on blip, leaving comments etc. even though I love looking at all the pictures. So I'm going to scale that back, and if by chance I miss posting a daily blip I will accept that it simply wasn't meant to be on that day.

By amazing coincidence the theme on Colour Me Positive this week is: Community. The universe was definitely smiling down on me!

As there wasn't much time to make a completely new spread from scratch, what with being away teaching and the arrival of Flora I decided to use some pages I did to show my students on Tuesday. I thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate that you didn't have to use a dedicated art journal such as the Dylusions one but instead used the sketchbook they were already working in as part of the Creative Sketchbook course which was an ring bound A4 sized one from SeaWhite.

The pages are great for sketching but not ideal to use with acrylic paint. So I started (as I usually do anyway!) by gessoing and I also made sure that the adjoining pages on both sides of the spread I'm working on are blank and after finishing the spread I glue the spread to those pages which makes them a lot more sturdy and also straightens them out.

The background of this spread was more or less done before class and for the challenge I outlined some of the elements and added the quotation that reads: "Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world" (Howard Zinn). It combines what Blipfoto stands for and also reflects the Community theme on Colour Me Positive.

 Techniques used: collage, rubber stamping, stencilling

Materials: for the collage I used old scrapbook paper featuring roses, wrapping paper, Tim Holtz tissue wrap and a handmade paper with a little flower pattern which can only just be seen. I also  collaged with deli paper onto which I had stencilled a pattern. For the rubber stamping I used a small detail from a stamping sheet from ImpressMeNow. I also used the following stencils, all from Stencilgirl Products: L435 Ancient Marks (on the collaged deli paper),  medium and small stencil from October 2014 Stencilgirl Club, small one from the October 2015 Club and also the small one from the August 2015 Club set.

I'm very grateful to have been a part of the Blip community for the last 6 years and it's good to know that together the members have ensured Blip's survival into the future. Having paid for a year's membership recently you will find my daily pictures there as well as here, hopefully for years to come.

Live with Passion

This is my contribution for the Passion prompt last week on Colour Me Positive. The new prompt for this week has just been announced so I'm lagging behind a bit but there is a lot going on here so I'm pleased that I did get this one done at all! Next week will be even busier so I might give this week's prompt a miss for the moment. Passion is a subject I have used before in my art journals and I tried to do something a bit different but as soon as hearts enter the equation the pages tend to take on a Valentine look, even in November.

Techniques used: collage, rubber stamping, stencilling 

Materials: collage (Lucas Cranach nude with hat image, magazine picture of gladioli, and heart, as well as a postage stamp), rubber stamping (using stamps from Everything Art stamp set EEA04 and the Whimsy series of stencils designed by Tamara Laporte for Artist Cellar) and the following stencils: The Crafters Workshop TCW467 Live Love Laugh as well as a stencil with hearts (no idea where that came from and too covered in paint to see a brand name or number!)

I added various quotations about passion by writing them on to the pages. They are: "Do it with passion or not at all", "Without passion life is nothing" and "Our passion is our strength".

Attitude

Our latest prompt for Colour Me Positive was: Attitude, and as you can see I found a quotation I wanted to use: "The only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude". Finding it is one thing, putting it into action is not always quite so easy and last night when we had a three hour power cut and the engineer saw fit to leave before ascertaining we all had our power back (we didn't!), I didn't entirely manage to put this quotation into action. Such is life and today I'm having to deal with the official complaint I lodged (a very deja vu experience) and I will once again aim to put these words into action.

I am however very happy with the spread I produced for the prompt in the A4 Dylusions journal. I found just the right "woman with attitude" image and the two postage stamps were just what I wanted too.

 I used collage, rubber stamping, stencilling and outlining for these pages.

Materials used: for the collage I used pages from a vintage technical drawing book, 7Gypsies Metro collage tissue, figure from a fashion magazine (Vogue) and postage stamps. For the rubber stamping I used one of the stamps from Nathalie Kalbach's Marks Cling Stamps set as well as the A la Fenetre art stamp by Carabelle Studio. I also used the following stencils: the large stencil from the October 2016 Stencilgirl Club, the smallest stencil from the August 2014 Club stencils and stencil S188 Ripples Small.

Dream La Dolce Vita

Working on this spread in the A4 Dylusions art journal and following the prompt from Colour Me Positive last week which was about Dreaming, I came to the realization that yes, dreams are good and yes, I would love to revisit Venice at some stage, but it is much more important to concentrate on making the day to day living as good as it can get, rather than put lots of effort (and money) into achieving a  travel dream. Both of us have been lucky enough to do lots of travelling in the past and I'm grateful for all I have seen and done but in the end you always have to come home. We know now that for us a house is not a home without a dog. Specially as there are so many dogs out there who need a kind and loving place to call their own. That is the kind of dream that we want to make come true.

All this to say that yes, a dog will be arriving here before too long and you'll hear and see all about her before too much longer.

In the meantime I didn't need any more encouragement to dedicate these pages to Venice, city of dreams, not just mine but lots of other people's dreams too. I count myself very fortunate to have been there more than once and at a time when there were fewer tourists than nowadays. I made the very most of every moment there and I can return there in my dreams any time I fancy. That is the joy of dreaming.

I used colours I associate with Venezia as well as a gold spray which you may just be able to spot on the picture above..

Techniques used: collage, stencilling, rubber stamping, spray painting
Materials used: paper napkin featuring butterflies, images of Venice from the travel supplement of the newspaper, rubber stamp plate #39 Venezia by Cherry Pie Art Stamps, flower stencil from The Crafter's Worlshop, sequin waste,  Italian postage stamps.

I am lagging behind with my Colour Me Positive spreads and I will probably give this week's prompt a miss in order to catch up. Still quite a lot to do in my indoor studio!

Simplicity Unsimplified

The theme this week on Colour Me Positive was all about simplicity, but somehow the pages got away from me in the process of working on them and I completely forgot we were meant to keep it simple! Then I complicated it further by using the quotation I found by Leonardo da Vinci in Italian. The English version reads: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication".

On the plus side working on this spread in my A4 Dylusions art journal was a good distraction and it gave me a chance to play with my new Stencilgirl Club stencils as well as with some 3 dimensional paints and media. I hope you get a glimpse of this on the pictures.

 Techniques used: collage (with vintage elements from a French dictionary as well as a vintage Robinson Crusoe book, and an Italian postage stamp), rubber stamping, and stencilling.

Materials: acrylic paints in inks, a rubber stamp alphabet set and a small rubber stamp cut from a large unmounted sheet of unknown provenance, as well as the large stencil from the September Stencilgirl Club Boho Collection.