Walk Like an Egyptian with Pam.

What a challenge!  A long, long time since I studied Egypt at school and all I could think of was Cleopatra and she looked a lot like Elizabeth Taylor. So what to do?  Head off to my favourite resource, The Children's section at the library.

Librarian was very helpful and we found heaps of illustrated books for me to draw inspiration from. So now down to work.   

First I played with the background to try to emulate a sandy desert. Used gesso through wavy stencil, various colours including yellow ochre, raw sienna, pale beige. Added some blobs with a Lindys dabber.

I centred the map of the Nile River and added my embellishments, inspired by my library book.  I also carved a stamp and used it.  The eye of Horus, lotus flower and rabbits.  Added an Egyptian border on edge of pages.

 Some close-ups of parts of the pages.

The completed spread.  I hope Annabelle likes it.  I am happy with the outcome. Egypt is full of dreams, mysteries and memories.

Janie's Dreams

Janie O'Brien's creation in Robyn Osborn's Dream & Fantasy Journal 2018
I loved working in Robyn Osborne's Dreams & Fantasies journal. I was able to depict a recurring dream with images of my present and past mixed up.

The Beginning. I first glued a leafy paper napkin to cover the 2 page spread.

In previous weeks, I had saved, printed and fussy cut many images to collage together to depict my story

bit by bit

adding the many doors to other dreams within my current dream.

some of the strange figures who inhabit my dreams and the many magpies that I continually dream of and miss so much!

The final detailing mists of colour and defining of various textures & colours

Robyn, I hope you enjoy my recurring dream and if you look carefully you can see that you, too are a welcome visitor through one of my doors.......

Exotic Butterflies for Janie

Butterflies are incredible creatures that are in thousands of different shapes, sizes and colours... such variation - some wander for thousands and thousands of kms, others stay close to home, some live such short lives. All are extroardinary and beautiful.

I've used Dylusions paints, Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers and Tim Holtz stamps (foam and rubber) to create a magical garden of exotic beauties.

I made the journal page a bit back to front. I'd made all the butterflies to this stage before creating the background. To make them, I stamped all the Tim Holtz Flutter By Stamps with an Archival black ink pad. I was going to stamp with colourful inks, but our encyclopaedia shows nearly all butterflies have either black, white or brown outlines.

Here they are resting after having their wings inked with Distress Ink Black Soot using an Ink Blending Tool and black Wink of Stella (shimmery paint pen) added to their bodies. The antennae was made using Tim's thick cotton thread attached on the back using Wondertape. Poor things had them chopped off with the die-cutting.

The background was made layer upon layer, using acrylic paints with stencils and foam stamps. I've used Darkroom Door Fern and Blossom with Tim Holtz Flourish, Leafy, Scribbles, Tiny Trees (called something else) and Feathers. 

The first layer was Lemon Zest and Dirty Martini, smooshed all over the page then left to dry as I sifted through my stencils.

Stencil designs were added using the Foam Blending Tool with only two colours, Dirty Martini (olive green) and Polished Jade (darker blue-green).

Using the Vibrant Turquoise and Funky Flowers Foam Stamps by Tim, I created the foreground foliage.

Flowers were then added using Lemon Zest and Pure Sunshine... the fab thing about foam stamps (apart from their cool shapes and not having to cut apart potatoes!) is that you can see exactly where to overlay the colours. 

To print the whole shape one colour I dip the stamp in paint and press, but to just add part of the stamp, like the white tips of the petals, I use the foam blending tool to add the paint.

Ta da... :D I don't seem to have a photo of the whole spread at this stage.

The two giant butterflies were made using Mermaid Markers (coloured in a basic shape), cutting out the shape (I used my Cuttlebug) using the Tim Holtz Butterfly Duo Bigz Die, then embossing with the texture fades folder. I then inked over the butterfly after it was dry, using Black Soot Distress Ink.

I created the big blue butterfly the same way. Then both got coated in iridescent medium and the black Wink of Stella paint pen after having their antennae added. I may or may not have added glitter... I was doing something else with glitter and shimmer at the same time so my mind could just be messing with me! lol :)

Closeup pic of one of my faves... who am I kidding, all the butterflies are my faves. Even the red ones after I added white spots and more glittery shimmery stuff.

Above : Left hand side, all finished with quotes and words from Tim Holtz Idea-Ology Chit Chat Washi Tape and Metallic Quotations stickers.

Below : Right hand side, all finished.

So there we have it. A completed flock of flutterbies and butterflies, almost as beautiful as what Mother Nature creates :) I love moths and caterpillars too!

All treasures available at www.shop.artbyjenny.com.au :)

Hope you like it Janie <3

Thanks for reading, wandering through this blog post.

Happy Creative Day!

:)

Jenny

AAJS6: Sharon's Pages in Janie's "Exotic" Journal

Hi Everyone

 

 

Today I am sharing my pages and process to complete the pages in Janie's "Exotic" journal!

 

 

I started with my normal process of adding Gesso to each page as the base to work from with sticking bits and pieces on and getting messy spraying ink LOL!

 

I used gel medium to add strips of gesso painted Asian newspaper and Asian washi paper randomly over each page.

 

 

 I wanted a bit more texture so I added some scrunched up white Asian napkins on each page as well and I also added a little bit more gesso to dull down the newspaper and patterned paper.

 

Once the gel medium and gesso was dry I used texture paste and a stencil to add the lacey pattern to one corner of each of the pages.

 

 

And once the texture paste was dry I used black and red ink sprays and a water spritzer to add colour to both pages.

 

 

The "Geisha" style gals are from a collage sheet by Gecko Galz and were a recent purchase I made and were perfect for the look I wanted on these pages - I liked the red and black colour theme. I added a thin layer of gesso to a page of the Asian newspaper and then put the page through my inkjet printer - I like the newspaper look still showing through the printed images. I tore the excess paper from around the images - they are too detailed to have fussy cut so I decided tearing them out would look the best.

 

Then I added the images to the pages with some muslin cloth and red cotton. I also used some tiny flower and leaf rubber stamps from Blank Page Muse in red and grey ink to add a little bit more interest to the background as well. I also tore out "Exotic" from a thesaurus and added it to the bottom of one of the pages - it's very small but gives a bit of a description of "exotic".

 

 

And the pages are finished! Hope Janie likes them!

 

 

Sharon



Looking for Wisdom

 Words of Wisdom arrived with winter, things were insanely busy with trying to sell our house and homeschooling and just family life.

I wasn't too concerned as I can usually create a reasonable spread in our allocated month fairly easily and incubation time always takes up the begining of the month for me.

I love the arrival of a new journal.  I love the anticipation and excitement and I love that first perusal over a cuppa. 

I tend to put it on the shelf then and let my ideas brew. Sometimes I will look through the journal a few times in this process until my idea starts to form. 

Sometimes I dont get an idea at all!

I just start playing and let it happen.

And this page is one that evolved on the page, intuitively.

 After 6 days sick in bed I was desperate to art despite have no wisdom on what I would create.

I just doodled all over the page with intense pencils then activated with watered down white and a tiny brayer. Looking at what came out made me think of pebbles on a beach and away I went.

Lisa playing in Colleen's Paper Napkin Journal!

Colleen's theme is Paper Napkin Art which is a really fun theme.  The journal is a lovely big A4 affair, and the way that Colleen has sewn around it makes you think it's actually cloth covered, not collaged!

I'm not a huge collector of napkins, but I did have the foresight to join the recent napkin swap, to bolster my collection!

So I started out just gathering my napkins together, looking at colours, and trying to pick out things that would/could go together.

Seems I must sub-consciously like butterflies, because I found heaps that included them!

Or is it just that they're a common theme for napkins?

Hmmmmm.......

Oh - not just butterflies - found a cute little birdy too.  This bird was from my favourite napkin.  And I think the only napkin that I used all of!

It included:

waves
a sail boat (which I cut up)
the wind
and French writing.

I love French writing!  It looks so elegant, and even the most mundane words or phrases are transformed into something magical when they're in French.

I lost count of the number of times that I glued a piece of napkin down... only to find that I had missed one of the layers.  And thus had succeeded in gluing down a bit of white stuff.  Aarrggghhh!  I did leave a few bits for a bit more texture.

I thought it was really apt that I found a napkin with the words

Jardin des Papillon on it -

Garden of Butterflies!




And here's the whole spread.  A big mess of lots of different napkins and layers all collaged together, and highlighted with white and black gel pens.

I enjoyed doing this Colleen, hope you like it too!

Cheers, Lisa x