LB2016 : Quirky Bird

I am very impressed with the start to Life Book 2016. Of the 8 lessons offered in the first 6 weeks, I've wanted to do all except one of them. It's not too late to join....Week 6 (last week) was a lesson from Tam creating Quirky Birds. I didn't want to create an entire page of birds, but thought it might be fun to create just one - and I was right :-)

After working so large in my last Life Book project (see my previous post) I created my bird on a small piece of watercolour paper (6" x 8") using Twinkling H2Os as my base colours, and then adding various markers, tape and thread to finish. Enjoyed the process so much forgot to take process photos! She was fun to doodle on :-) 

Took my final photo in the sunshine so if you click on it you can see some of the shimmer of those watercolours.

Go HERE to see my Flickr album of all my Life Book 2016 projects. You can see all my posts about Life Book this year HERE.

LB2016 : Fearless art

Next lesson for Life Book 2016 was a collaboration by Annie Hamman and her 3-year-old daughter on a portrait. Get a preview of the fun video they produced HERE. 
I couldn't convince my 11-year-old to collaborate with me, so just had to try being fearless alone. First fearless move, to use a double spread in my journal - working larger than I've worked before : this full spread measures 19" x 13 1/4" . And I'm not doing anything about covering the text because I think that will be cool in the background.

After my initial quick face sketch, I just dived in, with a playful attitude. Apart from following principles of where to place the main facial features, I tried to be free with random paint colours, and then with adding stencils, drippage, and further layers. Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's faces in her art journal have a 'fearless' quality which also inspired me to let go - check out this post for an example of what I mean. Without further commentary (hard for me to do that!) here are my progress photos

I had a degree of control with my stenciling in that I used permanent ink/paint in spray bottles. I adore the close-ups above and the eye at the top of the post. Shows you all the detail of the layers. This lesson was so much fun - I did let go and love her "messy" aspects. With a critical eye, I think maybe I should have left out the pen details in her hair, but I'm still happy with how she turned out : 

Click on the photo to see it larger, or go HERE to see my Flickr album of all my Life Book 2016 projects. You can see all my posts about Life Book this year HERE.

Farewell January

When I unclogged my spray bottles recently, I found a few that had hardly any colour left. I decided I would start my next daily journaling spread by using up some of that just by dipping and spreading with a paint brush.

In my last daily journal post, I shared photos from our lovely holiday in New Plymouth. The first thing I needed for this spread was to capture our memories from the other 2 days. Decided I would be best to do that with photos, and some simple stencilling

The camera stencil makes me smile and I'm happy with how that film strip turned out. The darker blue/yellow is from a gelli-printing session on clear packing tape. I ♥ including these lovely arty bits. The colourful paper beneath is from another gelli-print session - useful to cover up the printed words in the background which can become very distracting.
On the opposite page, that purple was rather dark so I decided to lighten it with some white Dylusions spray through a stencil, and mopped up the excess on some other coloured card for future use (never like to waste any paint/ink)

On our way home from New Plymouth, I called at a favourite store where I picked up these bargain stamps for half price.

They looked like layered fun, and indeed turned out to be so. It's nice to have a journal to try these things out :-)

This past week I've enjoyed discovering Brene Brown - see her TED talks at that link from her name, & I've been reading this book :

A lot of what she says makes sense to me, and I think this is another area where I can do some personal growth and transformation (my word for 2016) this year.
I shared my quilt top of "Wild Women don't get the blues" towards the end of last year :

Said it would be a holiday project to quilt this, but I only recently got it basted (backing, batting and top layers sprayed and pinned together) and started quilting yesterday - exactly a year since I did the class with Karen K. Stone. The photo I took for my daily journal shows my fabulous new sewing machine and my awesome new purple adjustable desk chair (Christmas present from my man) - they are both making the quilting such a pleasure.

I am so happy that I have finally begun this stage. I am not going to beat myself up that it's not done yet. I find it really difficult to focus on one thing when I enjoy many different art forms. And I'm not going to lose that enjoyment with "shoulds" :-)
So that's my last week, and here's my daily journaling spread.

You can see my Flickr album with all my daily journaling spreads HERE. Our new school year started today so we'll be adapting back to school term routines. Happy February - hope to see you again soon.