Thursday 5 March 2015

Visual Journey #10

Welcome to March and the continuation of my Visual Journey using an old altered book to work in. Since starting this visual journal I have experienced the greatest of freedom in expressing myself through my art and I am learning to free myself up from the constraints of designing for design teams and workshops. Don't get me wrong I love those activities as well and I am very motivated by challenges and time constraints but taking a little time to just go where the muse takes me is so refreshing.


These pages started with three distress stains - tea dye, bundle sage and brushed corduroy and I blended them over the page using an almost dry babywipe. Just before I started, the collage I made for Crafty Individuals last month came to mind where I had used a skyline and then that made me remember my Finnabair workshop where she taught us a layout using the same sort of idea, so I drew a pencil across two gessoed pages and blended the stains but in the end this ended up nothing like the Finnabair design I had in my head.


I decided to pick up my bits bag (leftover paper bits from other projects) and a wooden cutlery box where I keep leftover ephemera and embellishments and started to pull out items that would go together. I didn't have a theme in my head, I just wanted to see where I ended up.
As I was collecting bits together I decided to do some stamping in tea dye and vintage photo, then the distress damask came later using gathered twigs. I gave this a light spray of Americana acrylic sealer as I didn't want the stamping to smudge when I add the glued strips in the next step pf the process.


Here I have glued on strips of paper, torn pieces of tissue wrap and then used the tea dye distress stain dabber to make three large splats and a brush and walnut crystal ink to make fine splatters. Be warned the distress inks don't dry very well over the gesso when splattered.


I added the numbers 6 and 9 because they are the ages of my youngest grandchildren.


The 19th is my birthday, the number 13 is my lucky number and all the letters are in alphabetical order (well almost).


I finished with a few bits to give the pages meaning and tell the story, looking to keep an overall balance in the design.


The girl and quote was included in an order from somewhere many moons ago and I found it in one of my image boxes. Great quote too don't you think?



I seem to be at my happiest when creating collage pieces and in a vintage style.

A huge thank you to everyone who has been joining in and sharing wonderful pieces of journalling art. I look forward to seeing what you make in March, please link below if you would like to join the party and share your pages and ideas. This is just for fun and the opportunity to see how others approach their journalling. If you copy the link from here -
 into your blog post you will share everyone's work with your readers too.

Have fun and listen to your heArt.

hugs Brenda xxx