Good morning dear ones. A cold, gray morning in The Netherlands but I don’t have to go outside today so it’s OK with me. My sewing machine is on my desk (sewing on paper… nice!) I put the radio on and I entertain myself in the atelier. But first, let me entertain you with four art journal pages I created a while ago with the September prompts from The Documented Life Project.

September 5
September Theme: Journaling with Photos
Art Challenge: Photo Transfer
Journal Prompt: From Here to There

“From here to there” made me think of the bridge I have to cross when I want to go into town. I found an old postcard of the bridge, printed a copy of it and transfered it onto this page.

September 12
September Theme: Journaling with Photos
Art Challenge: Digital Imagery & Design
Journal Prompt: What Makes Your Heart Sing?

This is a photo of my feet. I used a Photoshop-filter to alter the picture. The photo has a Summer-feel to it which makes me think of walking barefoot on the beach. The text says “Walking barefoot through the surf of the sea on a sweet Summer evening makes my heart sing.”

September 19
September Theme: Journaling with Photos
Art Challenge: Silhouettes
Journal Prompt: There is no shadow without the light…

I cut out a magazine photo in the shape of a silhouette… the contrast of ‘sweet’ (the photo of a girl on the beach) and ‘hard’ (the straight silhouette) shows the contrast I wanted to picture. The journaling is about the both sides I have in me…

September 26
September Theme: Journaling with Photos
Art Challenge: Storyboard
Journal Prompt: A Week in the Life…

These photos are taken from my balcony last year. I planned to take a photo every day during a year but I stopped after two weeks – I found the scenery too boring and nothing changed much in 24 hours. (I might pick up the idea again taking weekly photos instead of daily…) I don’t know why I saved these photos… a few times I was close to deleting the series but now I am glad I didn’t ’cause it fitted well for this prompt.

A while ago, Art to the 5th presented the details of DLP 2016 but I will not join for several reason. The main thing: DLP works with a planner next year and I already have my “Chronicles.” Also, after a year of working with DLP I find it too much of an obligation to keep up with the weekly prompts. I might join again sometime, but I will take a break from it next year. I might still be finishing the prompts of 2015 in January.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today, I really appreciate it. Have a nice weekend!

WOYWW #324

OH MY… did I mess up the canvas yesterday! The ‘lady’ was a cut out image from a magazine (I cut the face out too, so she had a blank ‘face’) I was in doubt if I should paint over it or leave it a photo and collage around it or something. Somehow, I decided to get my paint out… and I don’t like how it looks at all! I cannot go back to the former phase so I will have to work with this. I might even cover it all up.

Same happened on the ‘intuitive canvas’ (I showed you last week.)
It’s not as messed up as the ‘lady canvas’ but I’m not satisfied either…

This canvas may become a repeating object in my posts…

Luckily, I have two art journal pages to show you that I am happy with! Both made last Summer for “The Documented Life Project.”

May 16
May Theme: Touchy Feely (Texture)
Art Challenge: Modeling Paste
Journal Prompt: Rising to the Occasion

I don’t have modeling paste so I had to be inventive. I had a stencil ‘bricks’ and thought of the song “Brick by Brick” (by Racoon.) I mixed gesso, heavy gel medium and sand to create the ‘brick look’ and wowzah, it worked great! Here’s a detail photo.

The ‘intuitive way of painting’ inspired me to try something like it on my next art journal page… here’s the prompt

May 23
May Theme: Touchy Feely (Texture)
Art Challenge: Cheesecloth
Journal Prompt: Say Cheese

and here’s what I made with it.

I love this page. If only I could create something like this on canvas… what is it, that makes me fear the canvas so much? I HAVE to get over that one of these days… I’m working on it sweeties – to be continued.

P.S. Don’t forget about my GIVEAWAY – you have until Friday 10 a.m. CEST to enter.

Here’s a challenge that I worked with:

In This Moment – We’re all taking a million photos with our phones. Scroll back and find one from a year ago today (or approximately.) Then take a selfie – and don’t get too hung up on it! Make a page about who you were at that moment and compare with who you are NOW. Design twist – can you find an interesting, novel way to incorporate arrows, geo-tags or other directional elements?

I started with carving an arrow stamp. I like how this one came out!

And here’s the page I made.

The photo in the bottom corner is from December 2013 – suffering from a burn out and living in a house that we had to sell without having a new place to live… I was really afraid we would end up on the street… the photo on the right top corner is  is right now… my beloved and I moved to Zeeland (the province I was born and raised) and although we live in a small apartment in a lousy neighborhood, I’m glad to be back ‘home’… (journaling in Dutch is about this) I stamped the arrows from ‘then’ to ‘now’. The photos are transferred onto images of clouds (dark clouds and blue skies…) I also used a little bit of Dylusions spray ink and a template on the background.

The other challenge that I used as a kick start for the next page was:

Sunshine – Use your spring colors (whatever those are to you) to create a tag or page as an ode to the warmer seasons!!!

I combined this with a Documented Life Project challenge

April 25
April Theme: Color Safari (Exploring Inks and Paints)
Art Challenge: Inks
Journal Prompt: Before the Ink is Dry

I like how this page turned out: Sunny and happy!
I used spay ink (yellow, a bit of blue and greens), templates (dots, flower-circles and a hand cut silhouette of a woman), dictionary paper (the dress), water-soluble crayons and black & white markers.

I’m looking forward to the weekend, my friend (and her son) from Eindhoven will come visit and I plan some ‘free creating time’ on Sunday. I also have some fun things cooking for the next weeks… and I am working on ‘something’ that YOU might like too! More about that on Monday so… stay tuned! See ya then!

WOYWW #303

Detail photos

Why do I post a photo of my desk, you may ask? That is because it is Wednesday… What’s On Your Work desk? Wednesday! This ‘event’ is hosted by Julia from the UK. Artists from all over the world post a photo of their desk on their blog and leave a link at Julia’s blog. More info about woyww can be found here.

The Documented Life Project
Last week I created several art journal pages for The Documented Life Project and caught up with the challenges I’d missed. The page I created for DLP #9 is to be found in this post, today I show you what I created for challenge #10

March 7
March Theme: Making Your Mark (Doodles & Mark Making)
Art Challenge: As A Layer Element
Journal Prompt: Surviving the Elements

For the Documented Life Project I work on old book pages. For challenge #10 I covered the page with a thin layer of gesso (you can still see some text shimmer through.) I smeared extra gesso on some parts of the page, which I heated with a heat gun. The gesso starts bubbling then, resulting in nice texture. I glued on some band aid, scraps of paper and a cut out photo. The photo shows a child on the run for a flood – it is cut out from a book about the ‘Watersnoodramp 1953’ (flood disaster of 1953) The paper scrap torn out of a dictionary says ‘flood’. I stamped with bubble wrap plastic and ribbed cardboard to ‘make my mark’ and doodled some circles. I sprayed just a little bit of graphite spray ink in the right top corner and the cut out text – glued onto the page – completes the ‘story.’

Thanks for stopping by my blog today, and when there’s a flood in your part of the world: run. If it is only raining, this might be a nice way to approach it:

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
~ Langston Hughes ~

February 14
February Theme: Layers You Will Love!
Art Challenge: Cover Up Good Stuff
Journal Prompt: Going Undercover

Finally, I found the inside of the figure too white. I covered the text in the first step but now I wish I hadn’t… I took a crayon and hand wrote a quote from John Lennon inside the figure. It finished of the page!

The quote?
“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”
It fits wondrous with the image and song lyrics that were already on the page.

I finished a page with the next DLP challenge (#8) too, but I show you that some other time. Thanks for stopping by my blog today, I really appreciate it!

This year, however, there was again buzz about DLP, and again a lot of my blogfriends joined the project. So I went back to the DLP site to see if it would be something that I could submit to, if it was interesting and fun enough to create a weekly page besides my Chronicles with (I won’t give up my personal ‘Chronicles’ journaling.) I found out that each month, The DLP team comes up with a “theme” and each week they post an art related challenge as well as a creative journal prompt. I read the prompts that were already given, and I liked the freedom it provided. The prompts give you the opportunity to interpret freely and create to your own wish and style, so I decided to join. I think it will be nice for a change to create on the basis of a given prompt, a technique or a certain material, and not worry to get my ‘weekly text’ on the page. I feel already that DLP will be a nice addition to my Chronicles!

Now that I decided to join DLP, next step was to hunt for a book to work in. The DLP team advice one of Ranger Dylusions Dyan Reaveley’s Creative Journals but, stubborn as I am, I prefer my OWN journal and not a fabric-made one. (Why? Well, besides the size of the journal and the quality and color of the paper – which isn’t always to my like, although I have heard that Dyan’s journals contain nice, sturdy paper – the fabric-made books never have the amount of pages I want. A weekly journal should contain 52 page-sides as there are 52 prompts to work with – I find that important. And more: buying a blank journal is expensive!)

For years now, I bind my books for art journaling myself but I have some lovely, old books in my closet also. For DLP I decided to take one of those out and finally use it as planned: for art journaling! I carefully removed the pages from the spine. Then, I glued together two double pages (‘spreads’) together to make it more sturdy and gessoed the page. I plan on working on the loose pages and bind it together at the end of the year. I don’t know yet what I will do with the cover so I leave it as is for now.

I made all three weeks/prompts last week, so I’m up to date when the next prompt comes online tomorrow… here’s my first three pages.

I created the first two prompts on one spread so they flow into each other a bit… I like it!

January 1
January Theme: The Blank Page and How to Face It!
Art Challenge: Book Paper
Journal Prompt: Be Your Own Goal Keeper

January 10
January Theme: The Blank Page and How to Face It!
Art Challenge:  Gesso
Journal Prompt:  “The beginning is always today.”- Mary Shelley

The prompt to use bookpaper on the background was easy: I work in an old book so there was bookpaper in the background already! Still, I decided to glue on some more pages from a dictionary that spell out the words goal, ambition, intention and destination. I gessoed around the words. I coloured the page using watercolour paint, oil crayons (rubbed with my fingers) and a bit of spray ink and a dotted template. I kept it transparent so the toned-down bookpage shimmers through. I outlined the words with machine stitching but didn’t cut of the loose threads. Instead, I glued them to the page so they made ‘lines’, on which I wrote my journaling.

For the second prompt (page to the right) the page was already gessoed. The given quote did nothing for my imagination, so I searched for another quote with the word “begin.” When I found this one by Lewis Carol (“Alice in Wonderland”) I knew that was it: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end. Then stop.” Fabulous! I printed a photo of Alice (from the movie) and transfered it onto the page using mod podge. The colouring is done in the same way as the left page. I handwrote the quote using black and white markers.

January 17
January Theme: The Blank Page and How to Face It!
Art Challenge:  The Color Wheel
Journal Prompt:  “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way …”    – Georgia O’Keeffe

For this prompt, I took a lesson about the color wheel from my own workshop “Let it Loose” – art journalers who took that online workshop will surely recognize this lesson/prompt… it’s about taking an excisting photo and coloring it in complementary (opposite) colors. Here’s the photo I worked with (taken from an tourist magazine about the city of Middelburg)

I used acrylic paint to paint over it.

I added (handwrote) a quote from Marc Chagall as the saying refers to the color wheel and to this piece: “All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”

Tomorrow, the fourth DLP prompt will be announced, and I’m already looking forward to it!

(If you are interested in joining “The Documented Life Project”, all information and prompts can be found on Art to the 5th