Valentine’s Art Journal Page

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This article is written by M. Carmen Sánchez – Cuchy from La almohada

One of the things I love about Art Journaling is that it is absolutely mine and absolutely me.

It’s where I express my joy and sadness, my ups and downs my success and my mistakes.

And it is the perfect place to experiment with new techniques or products, and where I leave my creativity fly.

And where to find the inspiration?

Look around you and find something you like. A book, your brushes, your room’s colours…

Look through the window or review your last pictures of the woods, the city or the beach.

What did you do yesterday? Is there something or someone special in your life lately? Any special event in a near future? What did you laugh at last time?

Search the web. Flickr or any other online gallery. Write your favourite colour in the search field and hit enter. You’ll be surprised with the results. Do the same with your own pictures.

I’m sure you have a huge list of blogs. Open a new folder on your computer and save your favourite works with a proper link to the author. Do not forget to credit when credit is due

Search pages of sketches and learn from other’s interpretation. Try to make your own version.

Let the music sounds…

So, while listening to my favourite music, with a cup of coffee beside me I left myself be inspired by the colours of one of the canvas hanging on my wall and our anniversary next month.

I love textures and colours, so my tutorial today is a colourful Journal Page… in Valentine’s mood

Start covering a piece of tulle with gesso on your page. Let it dry and then pull the tulle apart. It will give a beautiful texture to your page.

Pour some paint and spread it with a wet baby wipe. One colour at a time.

Stamp around the edges. I used one of my hand carved stamp

On a book page, draw a heart, stamp over it and colour it with watercolour. Cut it out

Glue your heart to the page and add a shadow with a charcoal pencil

That’s it! Hope you like it.

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M. Carmen Sánchez – Cuchy

A mainly self-taught mixed media artist who loves to play with textures and layers

Member of the Kuretake’s Design Team -manufacturer of writing supplies- Design Team Instructor of Stampers Best -american manufacturer of rubber stamps and cling cushion mounting foam- and contributor and guest designer in various Spanish and international blogs, she taught several workshops in Madrid and Barcelona and loves to teach from her own experiences, and encourage the students to think outside the box and put their inner self in everything they create, to achieve a personal and unique result.

You can find more on her blog, her facebook page, or watch her broadcasting live on her Livestream channel

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Travel Journalling Tips

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This article is written by Francesca Albini

A cruise on the Nile may sound like a calm, relaxing experience, but the truth is, most of the excursions start at 4-5 am, you are often dragged from one monument to another, and in the evening there may be special dinners, dances, music and other entertainments. There are only a few moments where, if you have the energy, you can sit down and sketch, glue, paint, or write.

I find it is actually better when visiting a completely new place to absorb the atmosphere and collect material to then work on my journal once I’m back home. I make mental notes about things like colours, sounds, impressions, temperature. I write key-words and a few diary entries on a document app on my mobile (I handwrite too, but calligraphy is not what I do best). I also have a folder to collect ephemera, ticket stubs, postcards, brochures, and, why not, the letter paper of the hotel or boat I’m staying in.

I hardly use my big camera these days, I prefer a more compact one, but still with an slr chip. I also bring with me a few plastic cameras and mobile camera apps. I very often find that the lo-fi images record the atmosphere better than the higher quality ones. Lo-fi also means you can capture images quickly, for instance when riding on a coach (less pixels or 35mm film are faster).

Here are three spreads from my Egyptian trip.

The first is more collage-based with bits of ephemera, my cut-out diary entries and some photos, one of which printed on a piece of brown manila envelope.

The second is a sketch of the view from the boat. I laminated the book I’m working on with rice paper died with a tea bag. I used pencil, gouache and bits of coloured tissue paper. The reference for the image were a photo I took and some quick sketches I did on deck at the time.

The last spread shows three photos I took, the one on the left is a candid taken with the good compact kept at waist level, the two on the right were taken with a 35mm plastic camera. I spread brass, ochre and white acrylic around the pictures and completed with rough homemade eraser stamps of birds and palm trees.

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Francesca is a visual artist using pretty much everything she finds around her to record and relive feelings and memories of places and emotions. She collages, paints, draws, photographs. Francesca loves mixing modern technology, such as mobile phone apps, with the simplest of tools such as glitter glue, crayons and other children’s art supplies. Read her blog at http://franjournal.blogspot.com/

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Technorati Tags: Egypt, Francesca Albini, Nile, travel journal

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Altered Book Art Journal by Wendy Whipple

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Wendy Whipple saw our shout-out for mixed media art journal photos, and was happy to pass along some pictures of her altered book/art journal.

“The theme of the journal is belly dance, and how I came to it,” Wendy says. “I found a book entitled Evening Class to use (my classes were at night) and then I discovered the first couple pages contained words that actually were relevant to MY story. Kismet!”

Here are the first 10 pages of Wendy’s gorgeous art journal;

Torn and cut mulberry paper, surrounding the book’s title, appropriate because my belly dance class was – in fact – an Evening Class.

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The edge. Each of those fringes attach to a tab. Each tab is a section of a journal I wrote for the 8 weeks of my first session.
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More mulberry paper (the back side of the title page) and the painted first page, highlighting words that were already there. The pocket tag has a picture of me as a baby, and a little journal note on the back.
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More highlighted existing words. Facing page has dance-related quotes, and a dancer I painted with acrylics on a paper towel (I don’t know why I did it, but it looks cool). I used chalk pastels to edge around the quotations to make then stand out.
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The big image is from a newspaper article about Dancing with the Stars if I recall correctly, but the swirling skirts and bare waist of the dancer reminded me of a belly dancer.
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Colored pencil, pen, and computer-generated clip art. Journalling in my own wretched handwriting.
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Facing page: computer generated journalling – much more attractive! and an embossed block of a paisley design using clear embossing powder. The other in-progress pages look very much like that purple page: a printed block of journal on a plain painted background. I have yet to enhance, embellish or junk them up further… although I am itching to do so.
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Wendy lives in suburban Chicago with her husband and daughter. She’s played with mixed media art for several years, but has only been “serious” about it since 2007, starting small with ATCs. In addition to paints and glues and shrink plastic, she enjoys photography, belly dancing, and online gaming. (For the Horde!). More of Wendy’s work can been seen at her blog The Creative Miscellany.

Thanks Wendy for sharing your art journalling adventures with us.
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Technorati Tags: belly dancing, Evening Class, mixed media journal, mulberry paper

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Expressive Art Workshops

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The Expressive Art Workshop e-Course offers you a daily starting place to contemplate your life and point you in the direction for developing a self-reflective, daily journal. 20 minutes each day will put you on the path of cherishing your own inner life and finding out what uniquely matters to you.

As you regularly begin to map out your inner world and ask yourself good questions your unique direction in life becomes more clear. Small changes can begin immediately and step by step you begin to become familiar with the landscape of your own desires and what is needed for you to live a consciously rich and intentionally authentic and creative life.

Click here for more information.

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