UK Scrappers has an Art Journey class twice a week this year, which I’ll be following avidly for inspiration.  The first challenge was a page derived from thinking about preconceptions about Art Journalling:

I enjoyed this one.  The background is Stewart Gill Acrylic paints, with a Glimmermist circle.  A leaf design was stamped with Grey Stazon, then the whole lot overpainted with Stewart Gill Alchemy to give a golden metallic sheen.   Hence the camera glare!

Another challenge I’ve set myself for 2012 is to journal my year in a big shiny new book (bargain in the Paperchase sale!) Here’s page one for a reasonable start:

Page 2:

Interspersed with an occasional random journal page:

And here’s the latest page:

I’ve just been loving my Art Journal since Christmas, so here’s a smorgasbord of pages that I’ve done recently.  I don’t care if they aren’t very ‘artistic’, I’ve really enjoyed the process!

Firstly a painty techniques one:

Next misted feathers from a  template

misted circles for Fortune:

A playful page trying bits n pieces out:

A page made from the Starbucks christmas cups!

A page experimenting with Gel transfers.  You wouldn’t think  this was a photograph, even the original looked like a painting:

And finally another gel transfer with stamped circles:

I do love all the inky, painty, messy techniques that you can get up to in papercrafting, but I don’t always want to use them for scrapbooking.  So when, on Monday, a friend gave me a book with creamy handmade paper for my birthday, it seemed like a good time to start experimenting with an Art Journal.   Luckily a few years supply of Craft Stamper magazine gives me lots of techniques to try out.  So here it is, page one, made with Adirondack colourwash spray inks, activated by painting the page with water before spraying.

Flowers cut from tissue paper are added to the corners and some stamped images around the pages - swirls are Fiskars Vine, text stamp is Prima.  Words are classic Omar Khyam from a little book belonging to my mother.  I’m going to use this as my overall inspiration for the Journal. The words are written onto tissue and then pasted on top of the background.  I liked the colours in this page and I’m looking forward to doing some more soon.

As I had an unexpected day off yesterday I found time for some scrapping too, and finished off this layout that I’ve been carrying around to crops for a few months:

These pictures were from the lush Lydgate House where we stayed for a walking week in Summer 2010.  The papers are Basic Grey and swirls cut with my new Spellbinders dies.  Journalling stamp courtesy of Maya Road and my dear friend Denise.

Finally I’ve managed the Monthly House challenge on UKS - amazingly way ahead of the deadline date!  Maddie hates these pictures but they make me laugh because although she came along without complaint for every walk we took in Scotland this summer, she didn’t exactly look overjoyed with the experience.

The patterned paper is Echo Park and the border to the photos is made using a faux batik effect with Colourwash inks.  Highlights on the alphas and butterfly are made with my gorgeous new Cosmic Shimmer drawing inks, another birthday pressie, this time from my friend Giselle.  Thanks for all my lovely presents girls!

We were cropping out at Olveston yesterday.  As usual I spent most of my time chatting, but I did do Debbie’s class to make sure I took something home with me!  The colours were Echo Park and right up my street, reds and greens, almost Christmassy.

So here’s the lo, I loved the little stars and triangles used to make bunting, and added a hand drawn outline to mine to give a bit of definition.

I’d like to do a version of this with more complex embellishment blocks, although I did like the stars cut out of each piece.  I used the wrappers from the chocolates Denise plied me with, to cover my buttons, and limited myself to that splash of silver for bling!

It was good to see the crop well-supported, and I’m sure it will continue to be so - if it gets the heating working!!  Roll on next month.

A bit lacking in motivation after all the retreats, but the regular challenges on UKS have kept me scrapping.

First LO from the October House challenge, which was based on a sketch and included Orange:

The orange is in the tiny Jenni Bowlin letters and the (really gold) embossing paste that I used to make the cog border at the bottom.

I used some of the painty techniques from the Just Scrapbooking weekend for this layout.  The background is painted in metallic purple paint highlighted with white acrylic.  Four texture patches at the top are made with fresco Flakes spritzed with Orange glimmermist, a Hambly rub-on, dimensional paste piped ina  random pattern, and Bead gel highlighted with Inka gold by Viva Decor.

For  the October week 3 challenge, I used the stamped frame technique from the Green Buttons retreat.  The challenge here was to use a stamp that you’d never used before - perfect for this technique!  Also ‘use Orange’ (again, a popular Halloween theme) and a non standard photo size:

Finally, for the October week 4 challenge, use a ‘free’ item, use 10 embellishments and a digi element.  I found all of these difficult elements, which probably explains why I don’t really like this lo.  Great picture though, of me in primary school, discovered when I went through my dad’s papers recently.

The background here is DCWV Life in Colour paper.  The embellishments are 1 inch bazzill chips, painted with Lava Green Inka Gold, clear embossed with chinese style stamps and then sprayed with purple Cosmic shimmer mist.  The title is digi then hand-coloured and the free element is the gilding flakes used on the hand-cut ‘7′, which were given to me by a friend at work.

Thanks for visiting.

Title sounds a bit derisory, but this is just to show you the last remaining layout that lingered from our Just Scrapbooking altered art retreat.  I left this one to do at home because it didn’t need any of the painty prepared backgrounds, so was a more traditional layout - although it does have some metal embossed chipboard scrolls on it

Pics are from a quick call in to the teeny tiny ruined Fortrose Cathedral - where I was more interested in finding a toilet and snuck (horrible un-English word, Ruth…) into the local hotel for a Clandestine wee!  But once relieved, the Cathedral impressed - because it was Soooo old and built in such an improbable place, on the edge of a deserted coast in the Eastern Scottish Highlands.  We were only passing by looking for Dolphins at the infamous Chanonry Point.

So while DH and I were admiring the history and he was trying out his new camera, but plebby teenagers were just annoying each other in a kicking competition.  Thankfully there was no one around to tut or roll their eyes at my poor parenting.

The papers on this LO are Prima Pixie wotsit, with lots of hand-cutting and the addition of some Prima blossoms and embossed chipboard swirls and frames.  I quite like hand-cutting, must try and do more of it…

An Indian summer is well and truly upon us, and this weekend has been unbelievably hot and sunny.  I’m sure it’s the first time we have barbecued in October.

I managed to find time on Friday to finish off the last project from the Green Buttons retreat - a sketch challenge from Mary Buttons.  I used some of the masking techniques from Ali’s projects last weekend, and used the mask in reverse to stamp the harlequin image. Then I used gold wire to sew the pattern and added some bling.  Happy with this, must try and use the wire stitches again sometime.

I was up in Birmingham this weekend for a ground-breaking event.  The first ever Green Buttons House retreat!!  Woo hoo!  What a great time we had.  We stayed at Harbourne Hall in Birmingham, which was an interesting choice,  A bit run down and spartan, but my room was clean and had been freshly painted - you could tell by the painty footprints on the carpet.  The scrapping room was perfect - large and airy with french doors onto the extensive grounds.  and even better, there was a huge Horse chestnut tree outside so I was able to gather a big bag of conkers to scatter round the house - perfect for September, which is, as we all know, Spider Month.

So down to the scrapping.  we had some wonderful classes, volunteered by participants on the retreat.  First of all we all had a play with masks, templates and misting, with two projects by Alipeeps.   In the first layout, we masked and misted a background with three different colours.  I used a gorgeous tree mask to create the first background:

And then the same mask used as a mask and as  a template to cut out the shape of the mask as an embellishment.

I loved this class and have resolved to do more masking - which is lucky  because when I got home there was a little parcel of  stuff I’d ordered, including 4 new masks!

Next I did a class myself - or at least gave out some written instructions and answered any queries!  This was for a kind of flip book made from a Graze snackbox, which was fairly complicated to put together but I was happy  to see that people managed it without mishap.  Here’s the one I made, charting Maddie’s trip to Uganda:

And inside:

On Saturday we started the day with Jayne’s Easel project which was lush.   The flower is cut from a beer can, curled and alcohol inked.

In the afternoon Jemma led us in a mini album made form money envelopes.  I just love this little project - it’s so clever and neat and you could easily knock one up for a gift.  I filled mine with snaps of flowers  that I took ina  single day around Loch Morlich on holiday;

It’s also filled with tags so you can get lots of pictures in!

Next we had a sketch challenge from Mary - I’d run out of spare photos so watch this space because I’m going to do it this week!

On Sunday morning claire gave us a class on creating borders with stamps - another great technique that I’ll be using again very soon.  Perfect for this pic of Maddie chilling out at the Welsh Golf Open, with an Iced coffee:

We finished off after lunch with a Speed Scrap Class from Thriftycrafter.  Good fun and brilliant to see how differently everyone’s layouts turned out!

All in all a wonderful weekend with lovely people - can’t wait to do it again next year!

A final page from the Just Scrapbooking retreat:

I prepared the background on the retreat, using painted layers, masks, texture pastes and fresco flakes.

While in Birmingham this weekend I got the chance to finish it off.  I used some metal embellies, also from the retreat, alongside the squirrel pictures, and for the title some fab tape that my teamie Jayne brought me - you colour in the white dots to leave the bits you want - I thought it was perfect for this title!