Art Journalling with Donna Downey

On Monday I hopped on the train up to Birmingham to spend the day getting messy in a workshop with Donna Downey, run by Creative Moments. I was really looking forward to it as I love Donna's pages which she posts for "Collage Monday" and "Inspiration Wednesdays " over on her blog.

It was a fun day and I learnt lots of new things. The workshop was product led, which meant that Donna encouraged us to play with specific materials (gesso, paint, gel medium, moulding paste, gelatos, stamps etc.) to get us to explore what we could do with them. I love this type of workshop.

Donna also gave us some interesting art challenges. This was the result of the first one, along with the abstract picture that inspired it.

This was a finished page, where the background was another challenge. I'm not sure about the writing on here though and I may go back to it with some gesso to cover it up. This is something I've learnt from reading Donna's blog and Julie Fei-fan Balzer's blog... If you're not happy with it, then change it!

Here are some more pages from the day...

Deep Peace

I've been working on a piece of art for a friend's house and it's been a great excuse to play with some of the techniques I've been learning recently. The words are an ancient Celtic blessing.

I started with gesso on some 12 x 12 card. I wanted to add texture and I knew the colour of the background would be quite flat, so I made my gesso swirly...

I stamped some stars and fishes using StazOn ink and then added colour with my NeocolourII watersoluble crayons. I found that with a little extra water I could lift off the colour over the stamped images.

I built up the layers using stencils. Here's my bird stencil again. This time I used Distress Inks and I was worried that it was going to wipe off from the gesso background so I went around it with a pen.

My favourite part of the piece are my shining stars, some machine stitching swirls with some hand stitching sparkle on the top.

Plans

Today's sketchbook page was an idea floating around in my head for a while. I used pages from an ancient A-Z to make the background which I coloured using distress inks. The ink didn't take where the gel medium had transferred onto the top of the papers when I was gluing it down, but I really like the effect.

I continued with the distress inks to stencil and stamp the rest of the details with StazOn ink for the title as I wanted it to be bold.

The bird stencil comes from a book, "Stencil 101". It has some fantastic , bold, modern stencils in a great size.

Dance in the rain

This is a quote I saw as a print in a catalogue recently and I really like it. I watched a couple more videos from the "3 hearts" workshop and had a play...

The background was made with acrylic paint, then a mist then alcohol inks. You can see how wet it was.

I used Claudine Hellmuth's layered stamps to add the images to the page.

I used a foam stamp set to add the words but they weren't standing out enough and were getting a bit lost in the background. I went around each letter with a black pen but that didn't do much, so I went around them again with my new white Sharpie pen. I attempted to colour gel medium with acrylic paint and use a raindrop stencil I'd made to make some dimensional raindrops. It looked awful! I wiped them off and doodled over the marks.

Look at the birds

Yesterday I got a Facebook invite from my friend Robyn to join in with the "30 day sketchbook challenge" . The idea is that it takes 30 days to create a new habit. I bought a new sketchbook last week as I have lots of ideas for images in my head that I wanted to get down on paper. I had been putting off starting the new book so this seemed like the perfect platform to make myself go for it.

Our church have just moved out of our building for the next year as we are undergoing a major refurbishment of the building. We are all really excited about new things. I feel like my work is moving towards church banners, in a modern, exciting multi media, stitchy, painty sort of way. I bought my new sketchbook to get some ideas down on paper. The book is A3, which is the size I felt happiest working in when I was an art student. This is new first new A3 book for years and I'm loving it!

I have learnt so many new techniques in Christy Tomlinson's "Three Hearts" workshop and I'm kind of amazed at what I achieved in my book in quite a short space of time. I couldn't have produced this page a month ago.

I started the background with some acrylic paint brayered on.

I put much too much paint on and so I lifted some off with kitchen towel. Look at this fab texture it created...

I had words in my head from Christy and from Donna Downey about adding depth and texture as I put the page together, so I added some white bubble wrap print to the background too. The tree is some corrugated card, painted. The birds are a gel medium image transfer using pictures from an old kids picture book.

I added some white Prima flowers with some paint centres too.