June Art Journal Calendar Spread

It's been a while since I did any art journalling, so last night I got out the paints, some stencils and other 'tools' and had a little fun.  This first image shows what I have done so far, with the little Post-It note squares (I cut them down to about 1.7") that I used as masks.  The word June and the numbers are Tim Holtz masks.

We have this wonderful recycling place called Waste Wise in town.  It's a huge warehouse full of wonderful 'junk' where you can pick up all kinds of interesting things for pennies.  I found this plastic 'thingy'.  My husband and I have no idea what it is intended to be used for*, but it makes a great paint stamp.  I often keep little lids to dip in acrylic paint and stamp, so when I saw this I though it would be fun to be able to stamp entire grids of circles!  If you look closely, you'll see the little black circles on my pages.  I love that they aren't perfect circles...randomness perfected ;o)

*I just couldn't let it go...enquiring minds...so I did some research and finally found out that these things are inserts for ammo cases.  I'm so glad I found a better use for it! 

The stencil I used is one by the Crafters Workshop.  I stamped over it using a make-up sponge (thanks to Creative Jumpstart for that idea...love it) and acrylic paint.  My final colour addition came from some spray inks that I layered over top before removing the masks.

I still plan to do some black pen work to the page, although I'm not entirely sure what I'll do... I certainly have to add numbers to the journalling squares and I might outline the letters and numbers...I'll post again when it's finished.

May Art Calendar Journal

My May art calendar journal spread is ready for the journalling.  I started by using various spray inks to give the page a gently mottled look.  I then added a variety of old silk flowers and a few paper flowers to create masks for each of the days of the month and I sprayed over them with green.  I removed the flowers...getting my fingers all inky :o)...and let that layer dry.  When that was totally dry, I came in with my Micron pen and did the lettering and a bit of soft sketching around the flower shapes.  After stamping the leaf shapes and the birds, butterflies and dragonflies, I used my Micron again to draw in stems and swirls to connect the leaves.  Finally, I did a bit of colouring with my Peerless watercolour pigments...and you have May flowers to follow the April showers.

Another Attempt at Christmas Lights

No mask used on this shot.

Well, I was fiddling with my camera last night, trying to get those wonderful bokeh light shots and I'm getting closer.  You can read about my first attempt and find the link to the information I had read to learn how to take these shots here.

I also got a couple of interesting shots along the way, that although they weren't what I was going for, I thought they were interesting.

I wasn't using a tripod since I was in the house and just wanted to do some quick experimenting.  Instead, I put the camera on various surfaces in the family room where the Christmas tree is.  The blurry shots are because I was resting the camera on a surface but tilting it up a bit for some of the shots and obviously I'm not as steady as I'd like to think I am. ;o)

The information I read said to make the hole in the mask quite small, yet my most successful shots were made without a mask or with the little shaped holes left out of the mask holder so that I was shooting through the rectangular hole.

I did learn that for some reason the cut out shape I was using ends up upside down and backwards from what I expected.

Upside down trains are out of focus.

Mask with no little shape cutouts put it.

 

No mask used.

My unsteadiness created these
interesting light icicles.

Pretty shot, but no bokeh at all...

 

Happy accident.  Not sure how I got this, but I like it!

These last two shots were taken using the little masks, but the resulting lights are so small and the overall image is dark.  Obviously I need to keep working at this...

Upside down and backwards musical notes. 

Hand Dyed Fabric and Threads

This week my friends Heather, Doeteke and Ann came up to the cottage and we had some messy fun dying a bunch of cloth and threads.  We ran into rain, so we ended up working inside the cover of the woodshed but all in all we had a great time and managed to have enough good weather to be able to hand our treasures out on the line to dry.  We all ended up with really beautiful things to add to our stash.  I can't wait to get busy playing and creating with my new fabrics!

(L-R: Doeteke, Heather, Me (Linda) and Ann mixing the powdered

dye and getting ready to play!  Either that or preform surgery!

Smiling for the camera.  Honest, there are smiles under those masks!

Drying on the line.

Some of our treasures drying on the line.

My new hand-dyed stash!