Demeter and Persephone

Mothering and children leaving the nest has been quite big for me of late, my firstborn has not followed any preconceived ideas I had and its been a pretty rough period so when Natasha came around for a visit and to show me her Goddess journal I know I wanted to work somehow with the Demeter and Persephone theme.

Its been quite a stressful, dark and worrying time for me as it was for Demeter and of course Persephone was taken to the Underworld so I wanted to make a cave or a deep cavern to build my pages from and what a way to ground my pages! I also had to weave in the pomegranates,one thing about working with such rich myths is there are many symbols you can include. 

I had been thinking back to when my firstborn was little and I remembered this song chant we used to sing of Demeter and Persephone and I wanted to include those words so each of my Goddess's got her verse for her hair. 

These songs come from the Reclaiming tradition ,

Starhawk and Anne Hill.

They also released a gorgeous book on raising children in the Goddess Tradition called Circle Round

 

I have also been wanting to create interactive pages lately so this one needed to have some of that , I ended up creating 2 removable Goddess heads and I had to create little 'holders'to secure them into the cave

I began writing their story on the back of them but it was just too long so I made a mini book to tell the story and it had to be in a pomegranate of course,

Here is my spread with the flap open showing Demeter, the pomegranate journal and Persephone, they all are easily removable and fit snugly in their spaces.

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. 

Flowers for Wendy

I love painting, drawing and making paper flowers so the hardest thing about this theme was choosing what to create!

The other pages in Wendy's journal are so beautiful, I had to make something worthy :) so with daisies on the brain, I started...

Of course, my hands said otherwise and I ended up with a background of blues! Waterlillies then... don't you love how our art makes up its own mind? I love those gorgeous flowers, and lotuses too!

I used Distress paints and stencils with a blending tool for the water background and handpainted the leaves. Those blue shiny highlights and water ripples are nail polish.

The petals were all handcut from scrapbook paper, edged with Distress ink.

I found a journal tag and altered it, then chopped it apart when I realised it was way too big! The ladybug and word 'celebrate' were painted over with clear shimmery Wink of Stella, not that you can see it here... but Wendy will see it!

The finished page needed smaller buds so more petals were cut out. Then some more shimmer was added... just a little :)

Mum and I had a bit of discussion about the difference between a waterlily and lotus... aside from the petal shape and those groovy pods of the lotus, they're similar and both are in lots of stunning colours... even purple and yellow! Simply gorgeous they all are :)

Enjoy celebrating all the big, little, tiny, large and enormous things of our world! Hope you like it Wendy :)

Happy Creative Day!

:)

Jenny

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.

My Garden for Robyn

Moving house took a "bit" longer than expected... its not that I've never moved before (I've moved heaps of times), but having stayed put for just over 5 years, I didn't realise just how much stuff I'd collected over the years! Thankfully, I found time to create the page in Robyn's journal before I packed and even remembered (nearly) to take photos each step of the way :)

So here I am, in Little Ol' Adelaide - we're actually in a small coastal suburb just under the dot marked for the city. I was going to say "a millimetre south of the city" but if you're on the phone looking at the pic, it would seem I was on Kangaroo Island! lol :) KI would be a marvellous place to be but here on the mainland is nice too!

I started my page with watercolours on the background, trying to be patient as I waited for it to dry between layers. I cut out the wombats, birds, dragonflies and frog pic from scrapbook papers I've had forever. The dragonflies are acrylic paper (like textured mixed media paper) and cut with my Cuttlebug die-cutter. I added a bit of glitter to the fairy wings and gave the frog a little sparkly crown... as all Frog Princes do :)

We do have frogs visit from time to time (some think their croaking is from crickets but I know better! lol). And everyone has fairies in the garden! Just because we don't see them very often doesn't mean they're not there.

The wombats were printed as one piece but I didn't like how they sat (stood!) on the page. I'd love to say we have wombats in our garden but it wouldn't be true. These gorgeous animals need room to move and our garden is a bit too small... would be so cool though :) They give the best hugs! lol :)

I do have lots of gorgeous flowers in our garden... some are weeds (dandilions, thistles and soursobs) but we also have friendly plants like trees, daisies, marigolds, golden wattle and others. Now we're with Mum and Dad, all our plants have a much better chance of living a long, fruitful life! I just don't have green thumbs like my Dad does :)

Now and then dragonflies will fly about, chasing each other in the warm sunshine. We're so lucky to see them, they are such incredible creatures!

Sulphur Crested Cockatoos fly by now and then. I've yet to inspire one or two to visit for longer than a minute, but one day it might happen. We have galahs visit and play in the birdbaths (and spoggies, blackbirds, starlings, magpies and Aussie doves) and beautiful pelicans glide about the sky, spiralling around in the thermals as they fly past.

So that's my garden :) We're very lucky and grateful to have so much beauty in and around our home. I hope Robyn, you like the page! It does have a photo of me as well but I forgot to take a final photo of the page before the book was sent on its way.

Thanks for reading my post! Hope it made you smile :) Have a happy creative day! xx Jenny

There's Dragons in my Garden

Some days I can work out the subject but just don't know what else to put on the page. In this case, I had Robyn Osborns's garden journal and I wanted to use the little dragon lizard that lives in my front garden. So I thought, what the heck, I'm just going to start and see what happens. 

So I gessoed the page cause that's how I start everything, got out my grey inktense pencil and just started to draw. I love my lizard.  He appears occasionally when I garden. I know he likes my garden cause it is fairly wild and natural. So I try not to disturb him too often. He's a great cooperator. He even waits for me to run inside,find my phone and come back for photos. Gotta love that. 

Then I wanted to put in my location so I thought about the compass I used in the shipwrecked DAJ that we did as an art swap not long ago. I image transferred it in place. Then I got the exact coordinates of my studio from the compass app on my phone and hey presto, the page was nearly done. 

I also added some journaling and a tag with some details about me to make the page more meaningful for Robyn. I was very tempt d to go all nerdy and write about the biology of the lizard but I decided to keep on theme. 

It's strange how close we are all becoming even though most of us have never met. 

I hope Robyn likes my page. It's very different to everything else in the book. 

cheers

Sharon Williams