Babywipes

A while ago, I was watching Joyce's Ustream, and she was showing how she glues babywipes to paper so it's easier to use them later.

I use babywipes all the time, to clean my brushes before I stick them in water, to wipe my hands when they get covered in paint, or to wipe off a bit of paint from whatever it is I'm doing. So those get lots of paint on them, and sometimes they end up looking really pretty. But cutting babywipes and sticking them to your Art Journal page is difficult, the fabric tears and does not cut easily.

Annnyyyywayyyy....

Here's what I did with the first batch I glued to paper, then cut then sewed together:

I see what you don't see

The Dutch game of 'I spy with my little eye...' would translate to 'I see, I see what you don't see...' I was thinking about that game today, when the last of our Christmas presents arrived from Amazon, in a big box filled with this:

What do you see? Do you see paper that needs to go straight in the bin, or are you like me and do you see... OhmygoodnessbrownpaperIcanturnintoajournal!!
(I have to be honest here and mention that Tye was the one who opened the box and said 'I take it you want to keep this?' He is very well trained...)

The paper Amazon uses for packaging isn't the thickest of brown paper, but on the plus side it's perforated so it can easily be divided into strips that you can then fold over....

I ended up with 28 sheets that I folded:

I will glue about half an inch into the fold (roughly where I put the bulldog clip) then put holes where I put the glue, stack all the pages up and put a ribbon through it.
I might take two sheets and glue them together to create a slightly more sturdy cover.

Because the paper isn't the thickest in the world I can't put too much on it. I'll do some test sheets on paper that was already ripped and I can't use for the journal, and see just how much paint it will take. I'm thinking of limiting my pallet for this to just black, white, grey and maybe some blue or red.

I've put the sheets in my flower press so the worst of the creases will hopefully flatten, and I'll start on the glue tomorrow. Yayy! Thank you Amazon for this free journal!!

Dripping Faces

Of course I could not stop at just doing the couple of dripping faces I did yesterday....



(And as the title suggests, there are more videos to come in the next couple of days!)

An artful mess

The other day I was watching something on TV where a girl casually mentioned that she makes paintings using a mixture of glue and paint and she paints with chopsticks*.
While I realise that this might be something people have done in school, I had never tried it. So what better place to try out this messy technique than in my Art Journal?

First I mixed my acrylic paint with PVA glue. I added a bit of water to make it a bit more runny, then adding a bit more glue until I got the consistancy I thought would work.

And then it was just a case of getting messy!



These are the first two I did, in my Art Journal:



Because I had too much paint&glue mix left, I also did one on a folder I use to scrape on my left over paint:
('Did you notice that folder before? No? Well, now she put a bird on it!')
and did some quick watercrayon backgrounds on some paper and did two more on them:


Oh how I love making an artful mess in my journal!

*)The documentary was on Channel4 'Amish: the world's squarest teenagers' and the girl is Lizzy Watson, and she takes this technique to a whole other level! It took me a while to find her but here's her website.

Urban Sketching from home (2)

I did some more sketches of pictures I took a while ago:







Note to self: take more pictures of buildings!

Inspired by Leslie

So the last couple of days I've been ill, and those who know me will know that I don't do ill. At least not as in, being-sick-ill. And I was being-sick-ill. And then I was panicking about being-more-sick-ill and it all just got horrible and awful and I haven't eaten for two days and I stayed in bed putting my pillows so I'd be half-sitting just in case... well..

As you can imagine the last couple of days have not been much fun.

So today was the first time I got the laptop out again (I had been on Twitter and Facebook but on my phone which isn't half as much fun but it was a great distraction - thank you my Tweeter/FBer friends!) and I was catching up on some Youtube videos and saw Leslie Herger's 'automatic drawing' videos. (here and here and she's done a bunch more)

Even though I'm still not 100% there yet and my tumtum is still playing up a bit, I got one of my sketchpads out and some cheapy markers and did this one:
(the colours are nowhere near as bright in real life but it's the best I can do at the moment)

It felt good to be drawing again, rather than slipping into another 'will I be able to reach the sick bucket in time'-panic (I am an emetophobic, so even though I'm joking about it here it really does set off a bad panic attack, just as panic attacks can set off the fear of having to be sick...) I calmed down and focused on just filling in the colours.

I'll be sticking this in my Art Journal as a reminder of how art can prevent me from going overboard in my head. Just breathe and fill in the colours...

Edit:
This is the page I ended up doing:

Say my name (right)

I've been meaning to do this video for a while now, but never got round to it, so tonight I decided to take some time out and actually do it.. It's possibly the shortest video I've ever done, but would you believe it, I had to do a billion takes because I was stumbling over my words and then it took me forever for Youtube to not make me sound like a robot on acid...

But here it is...