Natasha's Goddess Journal

Natasha joined our swap group and our journal swap a few rounds back and created a gorgeous journal with the theme of Goddess

I have had the great pleasure of hosting this journal in my home and It has been like a visiting art exhibition! I have shown it to almost every visitor and looked at it many times myself. 

This is the full opened cover- it is just gorgeous!

This gorgeous page dedicated to Lakshmi is created by
 Robyn Osbourne. 

I think we can all do with a little Lakshmi in our lives.

I love how Robyn altered and did her tag for Tash as well-

Very clever Robyn.

Our lovely Roz Willoughby is next and her pages are just beautiful.

Roz worked with Kwan Yin

in line with her deep appreciation and inspiration with all things Asian.
Roz has 2 opening flaps so added her research
and beautiful symbology in those areas. 

Next we are off to Ireland and Jan Mullanes beautiful page for Brigit

I have a personal fondness for the Celtic Pantheon

and I adore Celtic knotwork.

Jan even has Brigit's well I would love to visit one day. 

I love how Jan works, her pages are always gorgeous and I am really thankful to those artists who come back and join another round ( or 2) of the AAJS because it is a real privilege to share their own personal development and in a very different way we get to know each other.

Gail Bourke bought Artemis into the journal 

And Rachel Thomas who loves working with flowers so much

bought the Goddess Antheia to the page

She is the Goddess of Love and Flowers

Then we have these incredible pages!

Jenny James you have outdone yourself. 

This wild and wooly Goddess is Calypso

and she has a host of characters
and quirky details you don't see at first.

Jenny I love this entry. 

Another long term contributor

 Sharon Williams

has bought her own style

 and I alway love Sharon's work,

I cant imagine who else would have Lucille Ball

and I love Lucy :)

as Hesta

but what a perfect domestic Goddess she is. 

This page to Gaia is unsigned but thanks to my co detective Pam Parker we tracked it down to Lee Hynes who also made this amazing hanging Goddess 

I love Wendy's amazing Moon Goddess page

I also love and so appreciate how Wendy will just jump into any theme and create her own gorgeous interpretation, usually generously sharing her process and inspiring everyone else. 

And lastly I got to play as well and created my pages for Demeter and Persephone. 

Lisa J's Guest Spot in Sharon's Vintage Circus Journal

Sharon's Round 2 "Vintage Circus" journal came home to her late last year and, as she still had a few blank pages in it, I was able to do a spread!

Sharon's brief was no bright colours.  Trying to limit your palette to softer vintage colours is quite challenging!  But that's where good old Pinterest comes in.

I found this amazing black and white photo of a clown.  I'm not sure why, but it spoke to me.

Perhaps because the circuses of yesteryear are no more, and we look back wistfully in remembrance...

When I was about 7 or 8, I was living in the USA and got to see the Barnum and Bailey Ringling Bros 3 ring circus.  

What a spectacle!   So much going on under the huge canopy of the big top.  So much to see in the 3 rings - too much really!

So I created my own big top, with the old elephant balancing on a ball, the tightrope walker balancing en pointe above him...

And the strong man wielding his 300lb weights with ease, to the amazement of the crowd...

And the sad clown, about to join the party.  "Send in the Clowns".

Here's the whole scene!  

Painted this in acrylics with some water soluble pencil added.

Beautiful journal, thanks for letting me have a play Sharon!

Cheers, Lisa

Deb's "Guest entry" In Sharon's Vintage Circus Round 2 Journal

Firstly, I have to tell you what an absolutely stunning piece of art this journal is, Sharon and I am so thankful you let me have a "Guest Spot"  in it as I am a Round 3 Blogger/Journal entrant. She's ready to come home!

I started with Distress paints in Fossilized Amber and Candied Apple which I applied to the paper with baby wipes, blending it all. I also stamped a vintage globe/map stamp in Archival Ink randomly across both pages.

I had already cut out my images in Black and red plain card-stock using my Pazzles Inspiration machine. The Circus tent image I resized several times and cut out block silhouettes of a bear, monkey and unicorn as well as a Signpost. I left out the Hippo insert, crossed out the sign and then wrote "Unicorn" on the signpost , as we would all pay money to see one of those! I then shuffled these images around the first page till I was happy and stuck then down with gel medium. I also used on eof the Admit One coupons that I was asked to include in my spread, after I crumpled it and then covered it with Distress inks in Vintage Photo and Black Soot . I then applied a coat of Prima Clear Crackle texture paste over it all and let it dry. it looked a bit bare still, so i stamped some background texture stamps in archival coffee and some stars in pink.

For the right page I stuck down the large red circus tent with gel medium. I then filled in a piece of watercolor paper with some Lindy's Stamp Gang Colorshots Sprays in Lump'o'coal and green. These are such gorgeous metallic colours that have a lot of pigment to them. I then had a Kaisercraft stamp and die set that I absolutely adore (funnily enough named Elephant) and stamped it onto my prepared water colour paper using archival ink in black. But it turned out light gray so you couldn't see all that lovely Zentangle detail on the elephant. So I decided to re stamp with embossing ink and used gold embossing powder to create raised texture on the elephant. It didn't work out as nice as I had hoped but it is still lovely to see. When I recreate this for my own journal, I think I will use a Black pigment ink to stamp with and then use clear embossing powder so it should hopefully stand out more. Anyway. I then journaled in my own writing (which I am NOT a fan of) on the left and finished off with the quote that came with the stamp set on the right. I used Stampers anonymous Mini Circque Alpha Stamps to stamp the title and a flattened beer bottle cap that I had saved from some beer my husband tried at the start of the year when I first started thinking about this entry. It says "3 Pub Circus Australia" which I LOVE! to make my gorgeous elephant pop some more I stuck on a mixture of small and large iridescent sequins around the page and finished off with small spots of glossy accents.

In conclusion, I have really enjoyed this journal spread and I hope you do as well Sharon. I will post her off back to you on Monday! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone from our Journal swaps. Wishing you all the best for today and the year ahead.

Deb Stephens. 

Lisa J - Working in Jan's Faces and Figures Journal

Jan's journal is in Round 2 and her baby arrived home last month, with a few empty pages.  So I jumped at the chance to fill one of those blank spots, and Jan was happy to oblige!

I love drawing/painting faces and trying to improve on my techniques, so knew this is what  I wanted to do.  I found an interesting face in Pinterest to use as a guide.  

For my background I laid down part of a French diary I have, a beautiful peacock feather serviette, some gelli printed papers, and an old book page.  The remainder was given a pink wash with watercolour.

I painted my girl in, and used water soluble pencil for her features.  I love the way Toni Burt does this, and in my next life I want to be able to paint like her! :)

Her hair was done with modelling paste, and didn't quite turn out how I had hoped.  Oh well, art is all about experimenting after all!  To go with the pink background I decided to give her purple hair.

I added a few pink stencils and stamped images to complete the background.

The journalling came from a song that I love - Iris, by the Goo Goo Dolls.

Hope you like it Jan!

Jan works in Jenny's Ocean Life

This is a nicely made journal with lots of interesting bits added and interesting binding.
I really liked the monochrome cover and so wanted to stick to a fairly monochrome theme. Of course it got a little out of hand.
Then disaster struck! I had primed the pages but obviously not well enough and so when i went to town with ink and water etc etc I found it had leaked through to the other side of the page...heart in mouth... then as I had left a page in between it wasn't on anyone else's work. Phew. Thank goodness.
I am always a little afraid when working in others journals of this exact thing happening and usually wrap all the pages firmly in plastic and masking tape while I am working in a journal.
Soooo.. Jenny never fear all is good, I just had to glue another page over the ink splodges.

I adhered some gauze on to the page and did stamping and doodling. I found a lovely poem and glued that down.
Hope you like it.

Jan does Rachel's Garden of my Imagination

This is a lovely little journal crammed full of lovely pages. I decided to do a fairly calm, un-busy page... but then of course my usual nature kicked in and it did get a bit more on it than I intended.
Here it is. I have also included for Rachel a book mark that i got in Suzhou in China. From a wonderful little street in the old town with lots of books and journals and art, I could have spent all day there. Hope you like it.

Pathways in Robyn's Garden by Lee

It was necessary to include a small pic of yourself in the spread.

 My i-phone won't upload so I had to make do with the PC cam, not a great shot but you get the idea.

Wendy's layout in Tattered, Torn and Treasured

Every time I picked up Roz's journal looking for some kind of inspiration, I kept thinking of my father and our "tattered and torn apart' family. So I went with that thought and used a family saying as the focal point of the layout. I put modelling paste, mixed with gold acrylic down and wanted to build up the layers on the page. My grandson had ripped the back page out of an old dictionary (made nanny a little angry) but I decided to use the ripped page on the page. Then to add another layer, I photocopied some of my fathers handwritten letters he had sent me about 20 years ago. Scrunched them up, ran the vintage ink over it with a teal coloured acrylic, trying to get an aged look about it.

I found some cotton netting gauze material and ran the vintage ink over it to get rid of the white starkness. I added a calico border to the page with gold paint on it. 

I found some vintage type photos from an old magazine, put gold paint around the edges and glued them on top of the letters.

I had remnants of an old table cloth my mum used when we were growing up, so I cut a flower from it with a bow attached, glued it down and then glued a teal coloured flower over the top of it. I used my ink pen to write the saying, a little bigger than I normally would as I wanted the saying to be the focal point of the layout and the pictures as fill ins. Sort of worked...lol. I added some of the teal to the edges of the page. Everything I tried to make look tattered and I tore all the paper used and my fathers letters and the piece of mums table cloth are my treasured. A pretty emotional layout for me but I think it turned out alright. Thank you.

Joan's page in Lisa's "Enchanted" Journal

I started by using a thick gesso on both pages, as I wanted to use dylusions dyes I was worried they would seep through the previous page.  Even with that, and working with plastic sheets between the previous and next pages, because of the holes in binding it still leaked a little, so I ended up gluing two pages together.

I used spray dyes, dylusions paints, watercolours, gellatos, twinkles and collage on page. 

 The fairy and the Cheshire cat were coloured in using markers. I stamped some flowers and used texture paste with stencil to create some foliage. The title is stuck on and outlined in white and black pen.  The Cheshire cat is designed to stand out away from page if book is standing up and open.  

On the left page I made a pocket with the previous page and put some Alice in Wonderland related journalling cards in there, I used one to sign in, as there is no designated place in journal to do so. I added a little decorated paper clip to close the pocket.

Jan's Page in Vintage Circus for Sharon.

This is such a lovely journal with some gorgeous work already done. I was glad of the wee lull in the Round 2 journals moving their way around Australia because I had to have an operation on the elbow that i broke just over a year ago when round one was going around and was in hospital for a few days and incapacitated. However with Physio and rest it is getting better.

I was given a lovely roll of washi tape for a birthday pressie a while ago and was really happy when Sharon announced the theme as I thought yay! I can use the tape.

Then I thought it would be great to include some of the photos from a show my daughter created all the costumes for in 2010 that was a vintage circus theme. The link to some of the photos is <www.behance.net/gallery/209862/lunamorph-show>

She did an incredible job (her ability to design and sew has me in awe) and all the performers were amazing. I had the strong man, Sharon, but no bearded lady. (That's another photo shoot!)

I base coated the page with Gesso then included my circus washi tape and collaged some vintage papers and then bit more gesso to tone things down.

I then got some frames and cut out the pictures and arranged them. My theme was Postcards To Home. Based on the story line of "They called me a Freak and so I ran away and joined the circus"

Hope you like it. Sorry it is a bit more like a scrapbook page but that's how it worked out. =)

Just discovered the link may not work very well. When you get to Behance.net just search Lunamorph... hope that works