Art Journal Page - Friendship

Here's an update on what I've been up to on my other blog. I've challenged myself to work in my art journal and post my progress once a week. To help me along, I joined a weekly art journaling group.


This page was a challenge for me. The groups' directive this week was to use tape as a design element on your page. As many art supplies as I have, believe it or not, I do not have any decorative tape. So I used what I had--masking tape.

This spread started out over a year ago as a color experiment. I used a paint chip from the hardware store as inspiration for my color scheme. But of course, the page needed MORE!

I found a quote I liked by George Washington about friendship, which became the theme for my page. Then I looked for an image of George in my magazine clipping files and found this reproduction postage stamp.

I started taping and gluing and then went over my additions with a light coat of unbleached gesso.

I haven't decided if the page is done, but I worked in my art journal! Yay for me! :)

Moving

December seems to be the time for me to make changes and new resolutions. It was December two years ago that I opened my second Etsy shop. Why wait until January when I can get a head start a month earlier, eh? ;)

The art journaling I've periodically featured on my blog has moved to Wordpress, come along! I've named my new blog "My Creative Muse" and will focus primarily on art journaling and the creative process.

Bookbinding topics can be found on my Emerson Bindery blog.

I'll keep the Studio B/UberArt blog around but I just feel like I need a fresh start. I've been rather directionless and without a clear theme here, yammering about whatever comes to mind. The Christmas posts I do here have been very popular but as much as I love Christmas, that isn't my passion--I want my posts to come from my heart. I hope y'all will transition with me and enjoy my new theme!

xxxooo
Beth

Caribbean Themed Art Journal

I haven't had much time to do any art journaling lately, but I can show you some themed books I've done in the past. This one was inspired by a few trips my husband and I have taken to the Caribbean. Now that the weather has turned chilly I'm once again dreaming of sunny beaches to warm my cold toes!

I used a paper sample book and decorated the pages and the covers. I took an old paint sample strip and glued it down to use as a pocket for my three little bird tags.

Hubby and I posing on a rock with the cruise ship behind us.

A scrap of batik fabric and a polymer clay tile I made.

A tribute to some of the people I've had the honor of calling friend
who have since gone on

It was nice to relive moments spent in the Caribbean on this nippy autumn day. Unfortunately my feet are still cold. Time to get out the heating pad!

Art Journal Spooks

So I'm a few weeks late getting this Halloween book posted, but better late than never, eh? ;)

Here is a Halloween-Gothic-Spooky art journal I made from a paper sample book.

I love working in these books because of the different textures, sizes, and weights of the papers inside.

Unfortunately, these little sample books are hard to come by if you don't know someone in the printing business. I'm working on making some myself and will put them in my shop as soon as I get around to it (and you know how THAT goes!!).

I burned the edges of the "bewitching picture" with a lighter to get a ragged, darkened look. Take care when doing this technique that you don't burn the house down! I keep a fire extinguisher in my studio just in case.

I used a lot of hand carved stamps to decorate this book. The flies, bats, and thorny briers in the photos above are all stamps I carved myself.

I'm not sure what happened to the black cat paper...it bunched up there. It looked fine when I glued it down but it must have shifted when I closed the book. The glue must have still been slightly damp.

Another reason I like these little books is that they're great for themed journals because they're just the right size. If they had too many pages I'd run out of ideas for the theme before I got to the end of the book!

I hope you enjoyed viewing my Spooky Art Journal! It was a lot of fun to make and I can hardly wait to get started on another themed book! I'll let you know when I get some blank paper sample books of my own design listed in my shop.

Art Journal Page

"Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead."
--Frederick Buechner

You've been warned...this one's a tearjerker, but it does have a happy ending!

I don't usually post many personal stories, but I'm long overdue for an art journal page and this is on my mind.

My little niece would have been nine years old this month. This is the only picture we have of her looking at the camera with her eyes open. Within a few hours she was unconscious, never to open her eyes again.

She was a perfectly healthy baby, full term, but due to a tragedy during delivery (and a good dose of medical negligence) we lost her. The placenta ruptured and the baby lost 75% of her blood volume during the birth.

It's been a long hard road since then, trying to understand why, then trying to understand that I'll never know why, and learning to accept it. Just this year, after nine years, I am finally making peace with it.

Which makes my newest little niece's birth so sweet! I would not have the deep joy of seeing her healthy and strong had I not experienced the bitter contrast of her sister's tragedy. Now I never take life for granted and realize what a miracle life is.

Silly Cat

I saw this cat displayed in a corner in a boutique clothing store. It was so outrageous I had to photograph it to show you! Perhaps I should use this cat as a launching point to do an art journal page.

Speaking of...ahem...art journaling...I have been remiss in keeping up with mine. I find little scraps of paper or see things almost everyday and I think, "Oh, that would be a great idea for a page." And that's as far as it goes. I wish I could commit to doing a page a day, or at the very least working in my art journal every day. I thought about making it a New Year's resolution, but I don't like making promises I can't keep, so I didn't.

My life is too busy and I've been giving some serious thought as to what to do about that. The wedding season seems to have started earlier than I expected this year, so making guest books is taking up a lot of my time. I've also been sharing my time with a friend who just had a baby, helping her out so she can get some much needed rest.

And there's my own baby...not such a baby any more...I'm trying to homeschool him in the afternoons after preschool. I say trying because I'm not very good at devoting enough time to planning activities to keep him inspired. I'm going to be homeschooling him full time next year and I'm scared to death! Scared he'll be bored, that I don't know what I'm doing and will screw up his education, and that I won't have enough time to fill orders. I may have to limit the guest book orders. Okay, just thinking out loud here. I'm done now. Thanks for listening (reading).

Wow, this post took on a life of it's own, going off in a direction I hadn't planned, all started by a silly cat!

How do you make time for play? I find I put it off until my work is done and then I'm either too tired or out of time. What do you do to prioritize your time?

Autumn Leaves

the storm blowing in

The leaves have been slow to change this autumn in Eastern NC. Finally the maples and dogwoods, the first to turn, are a bright red. The oaks are still green, but a few other variety of trees are showing hints of yellow.

My son and I went out yesterday before a big storm rolled in to collect leaves to draw in our journals. We found some lovely reds from the crape myrtles and the neighbor's maple tree. Our little magnolia tree dropped a nice green leaf, and we collected two more from my rose of sharon and redbud trees.

This is my journal page. I used colored pencil to sketch the leaves and a rubber stamp of a splatter pattern to make the mottled brown on the maple and yellow rose of sharon leaves. I'll probably paint around them and embellish the page later.

Here is my five-year old's journal page. I think he did pretty good! Last year he was capable only of doing leaf rubbings. My how quickly they progress in just a year!

And finally, I leave you with this...

Our post-storm view! It was actually a double rainbow but the second one didn't show up very well in this shot.

Walkabout

I think I'll go on a walkabout

And find out what it's all about and that ain't hard

Just me and my own two feet...

A walk could cure

Almost all my blues

Bare feet or in my two shoes...

I think I'll go on a walkabout

And find out what it's all about

--Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Walkabout"

I took my little boy out for a walk with our journals to sketch things that caught our eye. He isn't quite coordinated enough to hold the book and sketch at the same time, so he'd park himself on the curb and draw. I'm sure the neighbors thought we were nuts.

We repeated the exercise while on vacation. It is really cool to look back on now a month later. I can remember everything exactly how it was and where I was standing when I sketched it. I never imagined these pages could capture those memories so well, even better than a photograph would!

I absolutely HAD to show you this though, as my sketch doesn't do this fire hydrant justice. This is the skinniest hydrant I've ever seen!!

Art Journal page: birds

Just popping in to say a quick hello. I have been busy with lots of last minute orders for Labor Day weddings. It's amazing how many people are getting married over the holiday weekend!

I wanted to show you a before and after shot of an art journal page I did--

Here I actually painted the bird first. I had a library book on painting birds and needed to return it before the fines started racking up, so I grabbed my art journal and started working on blank pages.

Then I added a wash of color using a pigment ink pad and the direct-to-paper (DTP) technique. I chose the ink pad because it was easy to work around the bird without the color running onto him. I used the Colorbox brand Petal Point pads (I also like the Cat's Eye pads too) for this technique. They're wedge shaped and easy to use.

Then the bird just sat there for weeks until I thought of something relevant to write on the page--a story commemorating "Mama Bird" and the sad loss of her one of her little ones.

A happy ending to this story is the babies come by to visit us several times a week. One likes peeping out from under the shed at us and another seems to enjoy sitting by the water hose. They are so sweet!

Wise owls

I love looking for patterns and shapes in wood and stone. The tricky thing about it is if you don't quickly capture the image on paper, you lose it! Look away and when you look again it becomes something else. 

I was sitting on the balcony of a log cabin staring at one of the posts when I saw these owls. 

I left a blank page where I'm going to paste the photos below into my journal.

Can you see the owls in the logs? Or do you see something else?

Monkey See Monkey Do

My little five year old loves to work on his "projects" just like Momma.

Today he comes into my studio, announcing he needs some paint and paper for a new project.

I clear off my table, moving my books in progress far out of splash-range. I set up a placemat on the table, a tarp over my rug, and an apron over his clothes and let him go to town.

Apparently he was inspired by my art journals! This was all him, no prompting from me at all. Children have such a talent for color!

More Color Experimentation in Summer Themes

Things have still been demanding in my guest book shop this season, but I've left you all hanging long enough between posts. My bad. *hangs head and pokes at floor with toe*

Anyhow, I've been trying really hard to get some art journaling time in wherever I can. Even if I don't have time to actually journal I can prepare some pages ahead of time!

This one reminds me of a clear blue swimming pool.

Last year I posted about playing with color using those color-coordinated paint sample strips from the home improvement store. See that post here.

A very tropical feel. Pass the margaritas!

Well, I am at it again. It's fun to just do backgrounds because I don't have to think about it, I just play. At the end of the day my brain is fried from corresponding with customers and writing up listings. And it's better for me than vegging out in front of the TV (which I do as well).

Very beachy...sand dunes, maybe?

The combinations the paint manufacturers come up with aren't necessarily ones I would choose, but it's fun to do something different--it can really inspire fresh creativity to shake it up a bit!

A tall, cool glass of lemonade on a hot summer day!

I like the dots on this page. I could have filled the entire page with dots. It was hard to stop myself after just nine!

More experiments are coming! I had fun making these and sharing them with you, I hope you enjoyed them!

Grand ReOpening of UberArt!

The Etsy Bloggers first blog carnival topic for this month is Spring, new things and growth...tell us about a new item and what inspired you to create it. I have the perfect item and story to go along with it--

Those of you who have followed my saga may remember that I opened a new shop in December and moved all my guest books there, leaving my poor UberArt shop sadly neglected.

Blank 16 Page Art Journal in Crossed Snowshoe Stitching

I didn't want to close UberArt because I had some ideas for that shop floating around in my head but none of them felt "right". I have finally captured one of those ideas and it's a natural fit!

BLANK ART JOURNALS! 

Sorry, I don't mean to yell, I just got excited.

Lilac and Periwinkle Blank Art Journal

It's so nice how it has coincided with the change of direction in my art. I've been making blank art journals for myself but then I thought, well, duhh, maybe other people might need blank art journals too!

This one is an accordion-star-flag book, or some such combination of all those techniques! It was fun to make and is even more fun to work in! Since it will stand open, you can paint a bunch of pages at once and let them all dry without worrying about them sticking to each other.

I was trying to wait until I had more inventory in my shop to do a grand opening announcement, but Emerson Bindery has kept me so busy with orders that I haven't had the time I'd hoped for to work on the art journals. My first art journal sold tonight, which forced me to start on a new one since it left only one lonesome book in my shop!

I've got a cool brown paper bag art journal I'm perfecting at the moment so watch for that, coming soon!

In One Hour...

I did an art journal page from start to finish. No fooling, really! Ok, I'm kind of late on the April Fools puns considering most of the day is now gone.

I actually remembered to take pictures as I progressed....

So here's the story behind the art. Today I went for a bike ride with DH through the woods by a stream. Very poetic sounding, but really it was just a glorified drainage ditch. I wish I brought my camera with me because the woods were beautiful with all their colors and sounds. We tend to think of terra cotta and ruby red as fall colors but I saw a lot of those colors blooming up in the trees.

The birds were calling to each other and the crickets were happily chirping. We stopped for a moment to listen to them and the water rushing by in the "stream". Truth: I was exhausted and had to take a break.

I am happy to report I kept up with DH including a small jump over a dirt hill, but unfortunately I am paying for it now. Time to get out the ice pack and heating pad! ;P

PS- I suppose I should mention DH was traveling with a handicap...our little guy in the child seat attached to DH's bike. Perhaps that is why I kept up so well.

Art Journaling

Several posts ago (wow, has it been that long?!), I was talking about exploring the world of art journaling and promised some photos of my progress. Alas, I either keep forgetting to photograph my work or am too chicken to post it. I think it's some combination of the two!

One of my blogger friends has been posting about her dive headfirst into the world of art journaling and has now shown me for the coward that I am by showing pictures of her work. So...here goes. Forgive the smudged out text, but I'm not THAT brave! :D

I used complementary colors in blue and orange for this spread. One of my biggest revelations (and challenges) was to NOT think too much about the layout. I tend to analyze things to death, so it was really stretching me to just grab pictures and paste them onto the page without thinking.

This one worked so well...the little short guy and the clothing tag. Such irony!

I wrote in different colors of ink to emphasize certain words and to give the page some visual interest since there was so much text. I used Paint Pens by Sharpie for this page and I really like them. The extra fine point worked great for journaling.

I'm still in the process of discovering my own unique style so it's quite possible successive art journal posts will look different than these. I was influenced mainly by Teesha Moore's magazine collage style, though she takes her work to a level far beyond where I am at this point! After I get all my pages completed I will bind them together into a book. I'll show you when I'm finished (no promises as to when that will occur!).