Work Diary : back to school

This week it's the official end of Summer School Holidays for us. I am sooo lucky to work at a school library which means I get holidays off with my boys. I'm back on Thursday with my first Teacher Only Day when I organise the library and update the computer system ready for busy-ness to resume Day 1 of the term. Each year I like to personalise my work diary. This post has links to each diary below.

This year I started with a hot pink base which was fun, and I decided to add a piece of my art to the cover as I have the last couple of years. This is one of my favourites created this month : 

I adjusted the colour just a little to highlight the pink already on her face, and printed it on photo paper. Needed to add elements of SHINE as well ♥

I love using tape - the bottom piece was made on a gelli plate - see how HERE. Store on baking paper and it lasts with some of the sticky until you need it. I do use gel medium to attach though to make sure it stays stuck. I also love adding tape to the edges of pages - I tape around the weeks of school holidays to separate the terms

Very simple this year, but it helps to add some art joy at work ♥

Work Diary 2017

February means back to school here in New Zealand. I am very lucky to be a school librarian working part-time in a private school. It's the perfect mix of professional development, balanced life style (limited hours and school holidays off), and another chance to be creative (remember Craft Club in December?) A creative girl needs to art up her work diary. This is my 4th year now and it's fun to look back. In 2014 I was inspired by the original Documented Life project and using all the washi tape to edge pages ;-)

In 2015 it looked like this - used my {new then} moonlight pens

Last year I went in a different direction and printed out a background from an art journal page to use on my cover - loved this too ♥

I was still using sari ribbon for my bookmark

This year I decided to use my own art again and make sure that SHINE (my word of the year) is also part of my work time. This art is from December last year

And I included one of my current fav washi tapes - gorgeous soft turquoise with lovely gold dots for some more shine ♥ I've used it to stick together the holiday weeks so my diary is divided into school terms

I decided to do something different for a bookmark as well. Each term I have slightly different priorities and the times classes visit change. Decided this year I would include a flap that will do double duty as a bookmark

and also so that I can write a priority list and stick it down on the card so I can see it out to the side of my week without it floating around as a loose piece of paper

I didn't have to paint new card for this - it was one of the ones I considered when I made my Inner Work Journal cover HERE.

So none of this took a lot of time but it makes me happy that I am including my art in my working day.

Sharing inspiration

It's a long weekend for me : Wellington Anniversary weekend with Monday off. I'll share how I'm spending it later. I won't be posting my own art until I'm back, so thought I would share some recent discoveries that are not so much new techniques but reminders of cool things you can do. Hope they inspire you in your art.

I ♥ Pebeo iridescent paints - these are the two colours I own that have become fast favourites.

After watching this colour mixing video from Joggles, I'm thinking I may need some more, but of course I have other metallic paints that I'm sure I could use try these techniques.

This is another Joggles one promoting Dina Wakley's Media tape but could be applied to other tapes - it's inspiring for making your own or altering what you have. 

I've made my own tapes in the past on micropore tape and with a gelli plate on other surfaces 
A cute technique that I must try again from Stencil Girl Mary Beth Shaw 

: use stencils as rubbing plates underneath magazine pages 

- instructions HERE.
And if you're interested in painting faces with acrylics, there's a really cool guide to mixing skin tones HERE - includes a link to a FREE class about it on Craftsy. 

And I didn't know that Craftsy has an Art blog with painting and drawing tips
I love Geninne Zlatkis' work. See my review of her stamp carving book HERE. Every month she posts a piece of art that you can use for a calendar on your computer desktop. Go HERE for her blog. 

Above is January.
Strathmore have also released their list of free online workshops available for 2017. Beginning in March, click on the photo below to see it larger and find out more details HERE. 

I've added these workshops to my list of cheap and free online classes which you can always find top right beneath my profile.
Hope you have a lovely weekend. Talk to you when I get back.

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.

Week 43 : DLP 2015

Information about the FREE weekly Documented Life project is HERE. 

Vellum is quite ethereal so I didn't want to make my background too dark this week. Once upon a time, I had fun using gel medium through a stencil as a resist. Thought that would provide a pretty patterned background for this spread. Here's the gel medium through the stencils (wash your stencils immediately after you've lifted them off the gel)

If you click on the photo you can actually see the patterning. Then it was time to add sprays - so pretty I almost don't want to add anymore!

The prompt "Windows of my mind" made me think of all the ideas and responsibilities I have that get juggled into different compartments in my mind. Decided I would use 3 tags for this challenge - I already had some that I'd made on previous occasions :

The purple one was a fun experiment with wax. I then decided to write on the back of each one about the 3 main concerns that circulate in my head : creativity, my job and home responsibilities, and friends and family.

Nice to have a snapshot of the concerns in my life at this moment. Will be interesting to look back on in years to come. They needed to be prettier though, so I added sari ribbon and some metallic machine stitching to the edges.

Now to attach the glassine in the form of pouches for the tags. I wanted to stitch them, but that turned out to be too hard in the journal so I used washi tape, and that was some fun additional patterning

You can see in this close-up that even though I used a double layer of glassine, the background still shows through

Not sure what I'm going to do about my daily journaling for this week. I have a couple of ideas but it will depend what the next week's challenge is. {How I decided to do it HERE}
Here's this week's spread complete : 

Click on the photo to enjoy it larger or see it in the Flickr album I've created for all my Documented Life 2015 spreads HERE. You can see all my posts about this project HERE.

Week 24 : DLP 2015

Information about the FREE weekly Documented Life Project is HERE. We're still on Travel journaling and this was this week's challenge : 

This page started when I used modeling paste through one of my new favourite stencils (see my last post) and I decided to use up the leftover paste on my next spread in my Documented Life journal. Click on the photo to enjoy the delicious texture and pattern.

This stencil reminds me of lovely tapa patterns which meant that I was headed for creating another spread celebrating my lovely holiday times in New Zealand. I started tentatively with some serviettes and a bit of pacifica turquoise colour

Wasn't really sure where I was going, but I pulled out some old postage stamps, some tape, a map of New Zealand printed on a plastic bag, some ribbon, my {silver} fern stencil, and started to layer.

In the 1980s, there was a New Zealand domestic tourism campaign called "Don't leave home 'til you've seen the country"
I have never been able to get this out of my head. As the spread developed, I was remembering all my childhood family holidays in our caravan all over the country

and as an adult, although I haven't been to Paris, or London, or Italy (that last one is on my bucket list though), I've taken the road [perhaps less travelled?] and I have been to most places in New Zealand, and now we are trying to share all of it with our children.

In the above photo, the swirls are on ribbon, the black and white tapa pattern is tape, the ferns serviette, and the New Zealand is cut from a plastic shopping bag and glued down. Here's my finished spread :

I've enjoyed recording my memories in this way. Click on the photo to enjoy it larger or see it in the Flickr album I've created for all my Documented Life 2015 spreads HERE. You can see all my posts about this project HERE. Hope you have a creative and happy weekend.