Daily Journaling Week 29

I'm following the prompts of the original Documented Life 2014. Week 29 : Make a wish list - images from a magazine or draw your own pictures
And from the blog for Life Documented 2017 HERE : Theme: The road less traveled-traveling through life
Technique: Use up your excess acrylic paint with the best tool you own... your fingers!
Quote: "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone." Neale Donald
Another member of our FB group shared her page about Paris, and it inspired me to do a page with Italy as my focal because my biggest wish is to visit Italy one day. We're in dream time at this stage....

First some suitable gatherings. My wish images are paper serviettes and a map torn from an old book. Then I started adding acrylic paint - I wanted it soft and warm as I imagine the colours of Italy to be at this time of year so mixed just a drop of colour into gesso. You can see I dragged the excess paint over onto my collage page. I like the grungy imperfect look

This is my page with my journaling space - we have had stormy weather here at home so I used lovely lemon and orange for the imagined warmth of Italy, tile patterning for the architecture, and gorgeous blue for the sea.

Here you can see the excess acrylic paint used across on the collaged page for edging and amongst my lovely found words.

Some touches of gold because dreams always have a glow of perfection ;-)

Love the effect of the serviettes blending into the background. Here's my spread ready for the week's journaling. 

Back to school and normal routines tomorrow. 
You can see all my posts about this project HERE and my Flickr album HERE.

Creative happenings in progress around here

A creative update as we come to the end of our winter school holidays. I've ticked LOTS off my holiday creative to-do list, but bit frustrated cos I can't share everything with you yet. Here's what I can share : 

Love this glazed background - a BOD lesson in progress

Finished a gift  

: this will be delivered end of July so full reveal then.

I am making progress on my Hydrangea petals

I was invited to be guest speaker at Levin Embroiderer's group on Wednesday night and shared some of my mixed media stitch projects.

Had a fun collage box play day yesterday - this is where I got to.

It's a wet weekend here so hopefully more to share on this soon....but I also have to get organised for teaching again next Saturday 29th July - Star Book class at a local quilt shop

and I've been asked to be a guest artist for Life Documented in August so need to prepare that by end of July as well. And I also NEED to make time to sort out my studio space - it's become a bit of a dumping ground!

I am very excited about this new class next month. I love Mary Ann Moss's online classes - I have taken a few in the past and she is a delightful teacher. 

Luckily for me I had some birthday money left over from June so when her latest Stitch*Bookery class became available and I realised the timing couldn't be better (it's during our second hiatus month from Book of Days) I signed up. 

You can sign up for the first LIVE session of the class until 4th August and apparently she'll be running it again later in the year. 
So obviously there's going to be lots more to share here in August! Have a happy and creative weekend.

Daily Journaling Week 28

I'm following the prompts of the original Documented Life 2014. Week 28 : Add an Instagram or other tiny photo to your page. 
And from the blog for Life Documented 2017 HERE : Theme: The road less traveled-traveling through life
Quote: "Wherever you go, go with all your love" Confucius
Prompt: light and dark - creating dimension
Technique: using color in different ways, getting loose - acrylic paint
This was last week - first week of our winter school holidays. Decided to choose a photo first - I ♥ the beach and on Sunday of this journaling week we were there (we travel 1/2 hour to get to this beach from home). This is the other photo I could have chosen. This is where I "go with all your love"

I already had the very blue background of acrylic paint in my journal. I had thought cleaning off stencils in my journal was a good way to not face a blank page, but I have found it to be more of an extra challenge than helpful when I am trying to work with these prompts. I already have my dark, so wanting to create light. First I used some lemon on one of my hand-carved stamps for the sunshine on the day. 

I love stencils, so logical for me to add more layers in that way. Light to me always means adding layers of white and gold. 

I then added a glaze layer of Turquoise (Phthalo) - adds depth and creates dimension the more layers you do. And then I decided to add some more white through a tiny stencil and some vibrant green foliage. 

All my layers up to this point were using acrylic paint and I kept it loose by not filling in the space with the same stencil pattern. Then I outlined the foliage with my lovely gold metallic sakura pen - adding light and SHINE (my word for 2017) and added the XO to my photo and some sketchy outline to my small photo.

I love adding found words, and this definition from a large print dictionary fits my page perfectly, and adds a nice light contrast to the background. Click on any photo to see it larger.

I've gone down a different road than the page demonstrated for this prompt, but I am happy with the effect. I will use white or gold pen for my daily journaling on the darker facing page.

As I went to post at this point I realised I could do a small photo this week for each day and need very little words. So that's what I did this morning :-) I really like the feel of the page now the extra touches of black pen have been added

You can see all my posts about this project HERE and my Flickr album HERE.