Stretching high and digging deep

The weather was so hot here last week that the paint was drying on the brush! There was no chance that I could do any gelli-printing or gessoing on the page, so I squeezed paint directly on to this page and spread it around with a plastic scraper. It gave me a background of discrete blocks of colour rather than my usual merging colours.

Then I grabbed another colour from the paintbox and stencilled. These are not the sorts of colours I usually use together, either, but I was on a roll and enjoying my playtime :)

Standing back I decided it needed some yellow so I drew the circles directly with the dropper from the ink bottle. Now it felt more balanced.

Next came the stamping and the black fleur-de-lis over the original stencilling. At that point the page was crying out for a hand reaching out. I drew round my hand with a black pen, but it didn't show up too well against the colourful background, so I pulled out the correction pen and changed it to white instead.

Now it was time for the words. The hand was stretching out, and 'stretch' is my word for the year. I imagined myself stretching my hand up and the little figure in my head became off-balance. And there it was - I can stretch, but if I'm not firmly anchored, I will fall over.

I need to stretch high and dig deep.

Faces

Whenever I've done faces before they've been outlines - no shading. But I've seen so many fabulous faces on blogs shaded with wild colours and looking gorgeous. So here's my first real attempt using oil pastels. The thing I learned was that more colour was better. When I was tentative and only applied a little colour, there were gaps. Once I started to be bolder, the colours started to blend and look better. It's still a little blocky, but over all I'm pleased with it.

Journal Fodder 365 - Prompt #19

This prompt is Come out and Play. How often do you let go and just play? With no agenda, no rules, just downright having fun?

I spend time playing in my art room most days and I'm happy to potter about on my own, but I really enjoy have time to play with other artists. There is so much we can learn just watching how others do things, seeing which materials they reach for first, what colour combinations they like. Playing with others can push us to try new things that we might not even think of. How often do you watch someone do something and say to yourself, Huh! I never would have thought to do it like that!

I found a great post here about doing collaborative journal pages. Must give that a go some time :) For now I'm happy to be part of a circle journal/round robin and am looking forward to being inspired by everyone else's work, and hopefully inspiring a little myself.

Tags galore!

I was preparing a journal yesterday afternoon and wanted a tag. Oooops! None left. But I did have a lot of glossy card pieces that I'd decorated a while ago and hadn't got around to using because they were leftovers and not full pages. I hadn't really worked out what I could do with them. I pulled them out and found they were just the right size to make tags from. Problem solved!

Well, of course, once I'd started it was difficult to stop :)

Soon there was a whole pile of tags ready for further decoration. I won't run out for a while...

I also managed to make a leather cover for my travel journal. I'll be able to swap out the books inside as I fill them up. So all-in-all a productive day. How was yours?

Linking to Show and Tell Saturday over at Artists in Blogland (use the button in the bar to see what everyone else is up to)

Photoshop experiments

Been having fun playing with Photoshop. Bought Digital Art Wonderland with Christmas money and am learning all about the gazillion menus and what all the different things do. 

Not quite the same as getting your fingers dirty, but I am managing to incorporate some wip photos of journal pages. The circles in the sky of the second photo are from the Fall Fearless and Fly #7 close-up photo posted previously. It certainly makes you change the way you take photographs :)

Speaks for itself

I don't think I really need to comment on this...

And a few details of all the layers:

And my friend Heather's page from our fortnightly 'play-date'

Hope you're all enjoying the new year.

playing...

Have been playing with my new Copic markers. I like this Magenta stamp - it has so many colourway possibilities. Here are a few I tried out: