An easy and fun journal page.

I have a hand made 15 x 15cm journal which I keep for small, quick journal pages either trying out a new stamp or a doodle but mostly for times when I really don't feel like too much messy play. (I know amazing for me!)

If you want to create a page but don't want all that painty-messy stuff then use a piece of patterned paper as your base. Here I've used a cute piece from DCWV which I chose especially as it had the leaf pattern across it.

I stenciled some texture paste through a home made stencil and added a few bits of washi tape here and there. I say bits, I'm really into tearing it into small strips at the moment.

Once the paste had dried I mixed up some of my Shin Han paints (coming soon to Sarah Hurley) into this gorgeous turquoise colour and painted over the circles.

To further add to the background interest I stamped over randomly with the Ledger background stamp, a few mini flowers from the Doodle Home set and  the scalloped border too. I also stamped the houses and tree onto water colour card, painted them and cut them out.

I layered over my elements and decided to add some finishing touches with a white painty pen.

This is a really easy fun project for someone who wants to create a mixed media journal page without too much mess.

Have a good weekend.

Jaine x

New Year, new stamps, new journal page.

Oh my goodness there is nothing nicer than starting a brand new year with a brand new journal and I have a few lined up and ready but I've still a few pages in my big Moleskin which is very precious to me, so even though cracking open a new one is very tempting I've gone back to the old faithful.

A big reason for doing this was I wanted to test out my new background stamp on a large area. This is the stamp I wanted to try out, It's called Pebbles and I adore it

I did use it already on the calendar page for January but I wanted to test it out in repeating across the page.

After colouring my background with a grungy grey colour, I stamped the pebbles with black Versafine ink to cover the page. To stop it looking too much like a pattern I turned it upside down and stamped in landscape mode once too. There are a few gaps and if I'd thought about it I could have taken a black fine liner pen and drawn a few rough stones in to fill the gaps.

With that done, to turn it into a journal page, I decided to turn to an all time favourite technique of mine, silhouetting. All you need is a handful of images cut from fashion magazines.

I chose which one I wanted and roughly cut her out whilst also taking a piece of inky paper from a previous play session. I glued her onto the reverse of this inky piece of paper and then cut around her.

It's best here to use small scissors and cut as much detail as possible, go in after with a craft knife to get into the really tricky bits. The more detail you can cut out the better the silhouette.

Here she is on my background. The pebbles have created places to add some words and journaling.

I cut the title out again because I didn't like the way the black sat on the grey page so I just did it again and placed it over the top slightly away so the black would become a shaddow.

Have a good crafty year everyone.

Jaine x

Halloween is nearly here.

It's coming........that spooky, fun, let yourself go time of year!  Like most people, I love it. It seems like the whole of the DT have gone Halloween crazy and I don't blame them!

This is my Halloween journal page for the challenge which you can find here. 
I thought I'd have some fun with the Doodle Home stamp set. I had forgotten how cool this set is and makes a great addition to a journal page.

I just stamped them out a few times, cut them out and used a soft black pencil to go around the edges. My background is a bit of good old finger painting with acrylics in purple and white.

I finished it off with the quote and a few spooky additions.

Have fun this Halloween.

Jaine x

As it happens, journal page from start to finish.

It's been a very long time since my art journal came out to play and this page is the second in as many days.

I've been promising to post a journal page for absolutely ages now and after a couple of requests recently I thought I'd take step photo's of my process and try to explain the thinking behind the art. It's a bit photo heavy so I apologise if you don't make it to the bottom of this post.

Now don't be fooled, I'll be totally honest with you and this is a second chance for a page gone bad. The original was doing ok until I tried adding an image transfer which didn't work and the whole page just started to go pear shaped. I'd even gone as far as to fold it in half (see the crease down the middle) and put it in the waste bin but something nagged at me as I did really like the silhouette cut from a book page.

I rescued it and spread gesso over with an old store card. I love gesso, it's brilliant stuff. You can add texture into it, paint it on an absorbent surface to give paint longer time to dry, use it to add tooth to a slick surface for painting on or as I did just covering up stuff. Gesso is my friend.

Now to start adding layers and for me a page isn't a page without some texture somewhere so out came the paste and a stencil. I used a Sarah Hurley honeycomb stencil  and spread the paste with a knife just like buttering a piece of bread. I didn't cover the page with paste and I only randomly picked out parts of the stencil to use.

After a cup of tea it was dry enough for the next stage. I love circles and loosely drew a few around the page. They were more of a scribble than anything else.  

I added some colour using one of my favourite colouring mediums, Faber Castell Big Brush pens. I love these pens as once dry they're pretty permanent but while wet I can smudge them with my finger. I used two colours starting with a grey but while I liked the colour it wasn't strong enough so I turned to the blue.

The page  needed some more colour so I used a lime green acrylic paint. I did start by just rubbing the paint with my finger across the raised parts but ended up rubbing and wiping all over. I like to use my finger for painting a lot, it's sensitive to texture and loads of fun. The baby wipe is for taking off excess paint and spreading the paint around.

 

The next layer was some stamping and I used the Woodgrain background stamp without a block and some Stazon ink to add a few marks around the page. Not using a block results in a more random image and I was happy to find that the finished image was more like stripes than a woodgrain.

I also used the little circles from the Zendoodle borders and shapes set but this time I did use the block as they're quite small.

I needed to define the circles more so I drew around them with a black fine liner pen. I also sketched around the figure to make her stand out a bit more and added some touches of white with a sharpie pen.

I felt the page needed another colour to balance all that green and blue so I used the silhouette as a journaling spot and painted it in with red paint as a contrast to the much cooler greens.

 
A few more marks with the white pen, some ink spots and the phrase which I'd originally tried to stamp directly onto the page but ended up having to add it on a strip of paper after it didn't stamp evenly. I also added a few red dots of paint into the circles just because it was in front of me on the table.

Congratulations if you've made it this far without falling asleep. I hope I've inspired you just a bit.

Jaine x

Something a bit fishy.

Sometimes I just want to play and see where it takes me and this page in my journal was one of those occasions.

I started with a couple of Sarah's stencils and some ink just to lay down a background. I used the hexagon background stamp and red Versafine to add a bit of stamping and dribbled some more ink from the top.

I already had the idea to use the Doodle Doll as a mermaid, stamping the parts individually onto scraps of coloured paper and the punched circles added to the magical scene.

 So what could be more appropriate to go with her than my own fishy stamp set  "Don't Be Crabby" from the Special Editions range also stamped onto paper scraps.

 See you soon,

Jaine x

Playing with textures

Everybody has their 'thing' and I'm so happy when I'm using textures, in fact as I was making this piece I found myself actually smirking. (That's not sad is it?)

Anyway I thought I'd share with you how to make a similar background to mine whether it's for a journal page or a card topper, it's easy.

For starters you'll need a sturdy piece of card to work on. You need something substantial to hold all those mediums and layers. I used 300gsm mixed media paper but you could use a piece of cardboard just as well.

The first layer is gesso spread with a card. Not too thick but just like spreading butter on a piece of bread.

Stamp into the wet gesso. I used a new hexagon background stamp by Sarah. Please please please make sure you wash the stamp straight away after. Fill a bowl with warm soapy water if you know you can't wash it straight away as once the paint has dried it'll ruin your stamps.

Once the gesso is dry use a stencil to add texture paste. Use a card once again to wipe the paste through the stencil. I used the Chevron Stripe stencil.

You can also start to glue on some 3d embellishments. The thread, chipboard star and wooden leaves were all included in my monthly Kit Club kit but you can find lots of embellishments here in the shop. Once dry go over them with some gesso so they blend into the background more.

The fun bit is adding spray ink. You'll see the texture start to really pop out of the page at this point. 

Randomly stamp across the page.  Again I've gone for some of the Kit club stamps but it could be any stamps just to add an extra layer.

To finish my page off I layered some of Sarah's journaling cards from the Documented 365 range  together along with the film strip printed from the Say Cheese digi kit (I use this a lot printed onto acetate) and all held together with some staples. I stuck this down to the page and gave it a light covering of gesso just to stop it taking over the page too much. 

So there you have it. I really hope I can inspire you to try some texture and have fun. 

Jaine x