Thursday 8 January 2015

Weekly Visual Journey

I have started a Visual Journal and as often as possible I am going to make a page and blog it, by the end of the year I hope I will have a book full of ideas, layouts, quotes, colour palettes and further design inspiration.

The first page can be found here and certainly got me started on making a ‘quick’ (well quick for me) visual collage and I certainly had to push myself into working without a plan.

I haven't entered any challenges for a long time and have decided to 'keep an eye' on a few that I know will provide me with inspiration and challenging themes that will get me back into thinking about new ideas and help me explore and practice alternative and perhaps unfamiliar ways of approaching my art. The changes at PaperArtsy certainly look exciting and I will enter this altered book with it's 'fragile' pages there.


So I have another double page spread for you.


This week I wanted to try out  a photo transfer technique and began with two tags and a photo of my daughter as a baby and one of my Mum as a young woman.


I had researched techniques and decided to go with one I had found using mod podge. But my favourite wet glue is Evo-stik wood adhesive so I experimented with that instead.


Many of the tutorials you find say you can only use laser prints but I used my trusty inkjet printer and a thin photographic paper. When the photo was dry I adhered it to the distressed tag (face down) and dried it with my heat gun. I also let it cool and left if for about half an hour to ensure it was dry.


Using some warm water I began to gently rub it into the back of the photo so that the paper rubbed away and slowly the image began to appear.


I continued to do this until I could see the image clearly.


I gave Maddie’s photo a sealing layer of the wood glue …..


….. but not with my Mum’s photo as I wanted to see the differences. I actually prefer the matte finish to the shiny finish from the glue.


I gathered some collage pieces, tissue wrap, tissue tapes, scraps of papers and borders and started to glue them down.


I have to admit I did spend some ‘thinking’ time on this one but not too much, just enough to plan the butterfly in the film strip and to find the letters and numbers I wanted to add.


So there we have it my second go at creating a collage and this time with trying out a new technique as well. I have to say I am rather pleased with it.


Thank you to Nikki, Alison, Sue and Mona for joining my blog hop and sharing your journal pages with me. You can see their contributions below as part of the link-up. I would love it if you joined in as well. I am deciding whether I keep each linky open for 2 weeks or a month, let’s see what happens before I make the decision. So it’s ‘anything goes’ with whatever journal/sketchbook/ type activity is right for you.

This is the code to add to your post so you can share the Link Up with your readers.
get the InLinkz code
Please join our Visual Journal Link Up and thank you for sharing your inspiration with us.

hugs Brenda xxx