You Imagine

This is a collage/art journal spread in my huge vintage ledger art journal. The size of the spread is 16 x 22" and just lifting the ledger is good exercise for your arm muscles! It's made following a lesson in the online Novel Approach class by Tammy Garcia so not much mention of techniques on this blog. If you are interested you can purchase this class for yourself here.

I had fun finding images that I really liked from a variety of sources and adding them to the page on that background of rich red/pink.  So delicious.

While collecting all the material I came across this yoga figure and somehow she seemed to want to be on the page, perhaps to keep the clown (see below) company.

Going around in Circles

I'm slowly continuing to work the lessons of the Novel Approach online class by Tammy Garcia in my large vintage ledger journal. As it's a class I won't mention much about how I made it. I love the class as all the lessons are there and you can work at your own pace, dipping into them randomly. If you're interested, join in!

 However it started life as a collage of text and magery.

And then got covered in paint apart from some selected areas. I used raw umber and two different blue paints.

I added the stick-on letters. The words Going around in Circles were also the title of the first quilt class I taught after my very first large quilt Water Rings won the Scottish Quilt Championships back in 1998. Circles have been an ongoing theme in my work ever since. The quilt doesn't get an outing often now that I no longer teach but it remains one of my own favourites even though, had I made it now, I would have added more quilting and beads. Here it is:

Focus on Everything

The sunrise this morning was stunning. Orange hues played across the sky and I grabbed my camera as well as my spiked boots and captured it in the garden such as above and during the dog walk.

The price to pay for all that beauty was the freezing cold and icy surfaces. Even with my spikes it was very slippery. The colours stayed with us during the walk but by the time we came back to the house they had all gone and the world was white and grey once again.

Still a view like that sets me up for the day and I can add plenty of colour by way of my art journals and quilts.

This is another spread in my huge vintage ledger for the Novel Approach online class by Tammy Garcia. You can start this workshop at any time and work at your own speed. I have discovered that I enjoy working this large although the disadvantage is that the pages take forever to dry.And of course the temperatures at the moment don't help that cause. As this is a class I'm not going to talk about how I made it but I must mention that before I started to paint I added two vintage pages from an old book to the centre of the ledger pages to add some interest to the centre of the pages which were left clear.

 I used index cards as a mask and then added them to the centre of the opposite page using washi tape.

I once more added my word for 2016 to the pages. You have probably realized by now that it is: FOCUS. I also wrote various quotations about focus to some of the colour strips.

Letting the Light In

This is the next spread in my gigantic ledger. You can read about it in an earlier post. It's so large that I have to stand up to work in it and I find I do enjoy that. These pages are part of the Novel Approach online class by Tammy Garcia so I won't be talking about how I made it much here.

I loved collaging on all the different images. Some come from magazines and calendars, others are my own Instagram pictures printed by Social Print Studio, and of course I couldn't resist adding some postage stamps. Other images are from my gelli plate printed papers and there are also vintage images on the page.

We were meant to use stick-on letters and then remove them but they haven't arrived yet so instead I used a letter stencil to add my song text. It's part of my favourite Leonard Cohen song Anthem. You can read the lyrics and listen to the song here.

Insight

Lots of new projects are on the horizon for 2016. My greedy artist soul is always taking on more than I could ever hope to achieve in one lifetime but that never seems to stop me. In the end things sort themselves out as those projects I continue with, are the ones I feel most deeply about and fall in love with. You will hear all about them all in due course and here is the first one. Novel Approach is a paid for online class run by Tammy Garcia. There will be a follow up class later in 2016 called Groovy Grunge. It's all about art journalling, surprise, surprise. In fact all the projects are geared towards that. This particular one calls for us to alter a book. As soon as I heard that I thought of my much treasured General Ledger.

I bought this beauty some years ago in a second-hand book store because it was irresistible! Just look at those gorgeous marbled pages. The side view is totally stunning!

I had to have it just for that. Isn't it amazing how much attention was paid to a ledger filled with columns and lines to keep the accounts up to date. The ledger was never used so no one got the pleasure of writing in it till it reached my hands.

When you open it up what you see is shown beneath. More fantastic marbling and a beautiful woven bookbinding. It's beyond yummy. So when Tammy mentioned finding an altered book I grabbed this from the shelves.

There is only one disadvantage to this ledger. It is HUGE. When opened to a double spread it's sized 16.5 x 22.1/4" or if you live in metric land: 42 x 57 cm. It also weighs a ton! I can barely lift it and it's hard to manipulated on my worktable. So why am I going ahead and using this? Because I love it and I can't wait to start filling the pages with art.

The first spread is already done and you can see it at the top of the post above. It's a vision board (quite an in thing apparently as it was mentioned in an article in one of the Sunday papers this week with wonderful synchronicity). A lot of the images are meaningful to me and I'm not going into detail about those messages here, but I'm there in person too.  It also shows lots of things I'm mad about: textures, colours, vintage, fabric, beads,trees, sunshine,  you name it and it's there. That's the advantage of such a large surface! But I also ordered the largest size of Golden Fluid Matte Medium because the disadvantage is that it eats up a lot of materials!

I have prepped the ledger by taking out pages to make room for all the paints and collage, and I glued pages together to make them more sturdy. So I'm all set to go! I won't just be using the ledger for these classes but probably for other projects in 2016 too. Hopefully it will be bulging this time next year. I'm using an elastic belt with a lovely buckle (saved from the 80s, I knew it would be useful one day!) as a closure.