We are recently back from a gorgeous family holiday and I'm really wanting to get stuck into art fun and excited to reconnect with you. But after a holiday there are a few days of washing, stocking up the cupboards again, various cleaning jobs, and a general feeling of overwhelm when I see what's been happening in the online classes I enrolled in since I've been away! So I thought if I shared the beginnings of this project today I'd get the reconnecting with you part done, I'd remind myself that I've already made a great creative start to this year, and hopefully more art will follow soon.
Last year I shared my love of Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's posts about her Gelli journal - see pages HERE and HERE. She has an online class which turned out to be an early Christmas present for me when she had an early bird deal for November.
When we were preparing to travel, I made an art journal from her online class. I began with Gelli printing for the first layer of my pages and kept going until the day before we left!
These are some of my favourite first layers :
I love the gelli texture look - might have trouble covering some of these up....not the intention of the class!
Even cleaning off the brayer in the journal can give lovely unexpected effects
It's Summer in New Zealand and when it came to the subsequent layers I was getting frustrated trying to use a stencil on the gelli plate as I normally would - the paint was drying too quickly - so I just printed directly in my journal using a cosmetic sponge through stencils and also to print with bubble wrap/stamps etc for texture....
What began as a small gifted book of ordinary paper bloomed beautifully with colour, and this is just the start. Many of the pages aren't even finished with first layers yet, but they are often beautiful just as they are....here's a selection and you can click on any photo to see it larger
I can't even choose a favourite! I'll share about our travels and the art I managed in my next post. Talk to you again soon.
