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. 

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

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.

Sharon's page in Rachel's Garden of the Imagination

Rachael has created the cutest journal. It's cover is split down the middle like a garden gate. However the book itself opens like a regular journal. 

I wanted to create a child's garden complete with toadstools and fairies. This was fun. I just glued, and cut and drew. I was remembering the movie about the two little girls who took photos of fairies and their insistence that you just had to look closely and they were there. 

This was my favourite bit. The toadstool had craft paper top with butter muslin frill. 

The bird cage hanging beneath was a piece of washi tape. 

The two little toadstools are wooden cut outs

Finished page. 

But then I couldn't help my self and created one more. 

A dreaming person thinking of their ideal garden. 

I hope it's okay. There are lots of pages in this fabulous little book. I'm sure we won't run out of space. If you look closely at the background you can see a piece of paper from Wendy from our black and white swap. Two artists for the price of one. 

Wendy's page in Sharon's circus journal

I had a lot of fun doing this page in Sharon's beautiful vintage Circus journal. Although, I never went to the circus as a child, I did see a huge elephant in their parade down our main street when I was younger. I was in absolute awe of it's size which is why I have based my page on the elephants, the gentle giants of the circus.

Ocean Life by Sharon Williams

I had the daunting job of creating the very first image in this album. Jenny chose to send her journal to me before she had even done her own spread. Fear of the white page reared its ugly head for a day or two but then after getting my act together I started to look through my collection of ocean images and then the page sort of made itself.

This looks like a weird way to begin but this old biological science text book is my favourite source of images. It is 100 years old and is written in Latin. 

I have a great scanner linked to my laptop and I scanned this in at 600 dpi and 2x resolution to create the base image. My scanner can mirror image things easily so when used in image transfers they come out the correct way around. 

I love line drawings and am truely inspired by museum exhibits. I have combined my image with a quote from Jules verses "twenty thousand leagues under the sea". 

I hope it reminds people of the naturalists of old where everything was new and exciting and their greatest thrill was collecting a new specimen and documenting all they could observe.

The completed spread runs over 2 double page spreads to accomodate the cutout fish head image

Reverse side with second transfer and Jules Verne quote.