DLP Week 24: Recording Memories...

With all the craze over adult colouring books these days, I decided to do this week's Documented Life Project page as a black and white doodled drawing that I can come back to and colour at my leisure. It loosely records memories from our road trip along the east coast of the U.S. last fall, the favourite being camping among the wild horses of Assateague!

StencilGirl Blog Hop and Giveaway

I'm so glad you've stopped by today for our StencilGirl Blog Hop and Giveaway!


Today I'm going to create my August art journal calendar page using a couple of my StencilGirl stencils, including this feature stencil called Crossed Rounds & Squares by Andrew Borloz .  I love this stencil because it's really six stencils in one!

I'm also using Rafters by Mary Beth Shaw.



I started out by using a pencil and ruler to create a grid on the page spread and then used random shapes from the Rafter's stencil to trace shapes with a permanent black pen which will be used as my journalling spaces.






You're probably noticing something very wrong right about now...sadly I didn't clue in until much later in the process.

I threw some colour on the spread using  turquoise and yellow acrylic paint.  When I do this I tend to just paint random patches of colour, overlapping and mixing the colours where they meet.

Using Andrew's stencil and a make-up sponge, I added some solid red circles here and there, followed by some of the crossed circles in a softer pink. I painted circles in varying sizes to bring out more of the turquoise and yellow. And then I added a few darker blue solid circles.

While the paint on the journal page was drying I grabbed a page of the newspaper and used a different part of Andrew's stencil to get some colour and texture over top of the newspaper text.

See what I mean...I've already used five of the six patterns available on this one stencil!

I liked the crossed square pattern on the newsprint so I added some of that to the journal page too.

Using a small paint brush I added yellow or red dots inside the crossed circles to create the centre of a flower.

I love re-purposing things, and this little spray bottle (originally a body spray) makes a great paint sprayer.  I diluted some liquid acrylic (in the darker blue I used earlier) to a milking consistency so that I could spray it through the nozzle (start with approx. equal parts paint/water and add water as needed until it sprays easily).  This was then generously sprayed onto the stenciled newspaper and left to dry.

While the newspaper dried, I picked up my black waterproof pen and started doodling on the page, creating flowers out of those crossed circles. Other lines and swirls were added to represent vines from which the flowers grew.

I added some Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid to white paint to make it even more  transparent and started to paint in the shapes I had traced from the Rafters stencil.

Yes, this is when I finally clued in to the fact that I had way too many days in August.  Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking when I created the initial grid, but obviously I was far to focussed on playing with paint and stencils to pay attention!

Fortunately I was able to wipe off the extra white from that one shape that I shouldn't have painted!

Up until this month, I have always put the name of the month in that space in the top left of the page.  However, I decided I was going to have to make the letters bigger and put them in that huge extra space at the bottom (created by my silly mistake).

I first drew and cut out the letters from a plain piece of the newspaper to ensure they'd fit.  I then used those as my tracers when making the letters on the coloured newsprint text.

I painted matted gel medium onto the journal page, and the back of the newspaper letters to glue them to the page.







And here's the finished spread:

Have fun visiting all the other creative team members to see what they've done and for more chances to win in the giveaway!  Good Luck!

StencilGirl Talk

Marjie Kemper 

Kirsten Reed 

Leslie Jenison

Sami Harding

Corrine Gilman

Janet Joehlin

Linda Kittmer

Carolyn Dube 

Paula Phillips

Mary C. Nasser

Maria McGuire

Decorative Doodling...

Well, I finally met the Art Queen herself, Joanne Sharpe.  It was great to meet her in person after a year long friendship on line through Facebook and Joanne's online classes.  As you can imagine, she's even more fun in person!

Kim, another online friend surprise me.  She had told me she would be there during the day and since I was going to be there in the evening, we would not be able to meet.  As it turned out, Kim also signed up for the evening class and we ended up sitting at the same table!

Then, as a total surprise, my friend Jan, a member of GOE (our fibre art group) was there too.  She was a my place on Wednesday and had meant to ask me if I was going but she got side tracked and never did...

Here's a shot of Joanne teaching us some new doodling ideas and a fun collective puzzle doodle that we created.

I started a lot of little pieces, playing with the ideas and media that Joanne shared with us. None of these are finished, but I thought I'd show you what I've got and then repost some time when I can show you the finished pieces.

And, I was able to pick up a copy of the new Somerset Studio magazine and Joanne was sweet enough to sign it for me! ...'sigh'

If you ever get a chance to take a class with Joanne, online, or especially in person, I can highly recommend it.  She's an incredible teacher!

Feelin' Groovy...

What a riot!  There's another hour gone...  Sipping my morning coffee, Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Band's Feelin' Groovy blaring in the background and armed with my Sharpies, I had a flash back to the late 60's as I played around with lesson 9 in Joanne's online class.  When I finished my name, I decided to cut it out, glue it onto a page prepared with black gesso and then using a white pen I wrote the lyrics to Feelin' Groovy around the outside.  There was still some space left at the sides, so some 'groovy' doodles, made with metalic markers, filled those up nicely.

Doodle Letters

Still loving my Letter Love 101 course, I've been doodling some fun letters.  Instead of doing my name or a particular word (as the assignment suggested) I decided to create a few letters to play/practise the technique and then I made a full sized letter B and wrote a message inside it.

The message was inspired by something that someone said me today.  I'm probably not alone in this (often a pitfall of women as we feel we need to take care of everyone else and we forget about ourselves).  I should post this in a prominent place and read it daily!

I used my Inktense watercolour pencils to add the colour.

The final step was to add a few accents with my trusty correction pen.  I love the pop you get from that little bit of white over top of the colour!