Some random photographs

Ever since I got my smartphone I'm taking pictures all the time and everywhere. I often use my Facebook app to quickly upload a photograph unto Facebook and share it with the world. If you want to you can befriend me on Facebook and see the mobile uploads there.It's a growing collection.

I try not to upload more than one image a day and sometimes I don't do it everyday, but what I do like is that over the past few months it's like I've accumulated a little photographic journal on Facebook. They are just snippets of my life. I really like that.

Anyway, here's some pictures of the last few weeks. Some were uploaded to Facebook, but most weren't.

Sometimes there's lots of foam on the beach.

Slowly but steadily spring takes over, the world goes green!

Trees in the sunshine.

Dandelions in full bloom make everything pretty.

My assistant carefully watching those pesky birds.

A pond in the forest.

So many dunes here!

The city of Harlingen, where the ferry arrives on the main land.

Another pond in the forest, a bigger one.

Sunrise over the Wadden Sea

Perfect reflection in yet another pond.

Detail of a beach dam.

Colored pencils, yummy!

A look at the village from a dyke.

My assistant going zen.

Working on my pretty papers.

I have several camera apps on my phone, but I keep grabbing for RetroCamera and its polaroid setting. I just love the colors this app gives. And I like printing these with a little room to write stuff on to put in my journal.

Hope you enjoyed this peek in my photo-album and wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!

What are you up to Wednesday - part 44

No woyww today, for the simple reason that I just don't have the time to look at other people's desks this week and it doesn't seem fair to join a bloghop that way. But...I do want to show you what I've been up to and what's on my workdesk today, so we'll just make it an old fashioned What are you up to post.

So here's my desk as it looks right now:

I'm cutting out images from magazines. The magazine you see here is one of my favorites for collage fodder,  Flow. It's a Dutch magazine and full of the most wonderful imagery. Very retro often. The reason I'm cutting out these images is because I had this sudden urge to make a little journal that measures about 6x8 inches (15x21cm). You can see it on the left of the above picture. It's made of Fabriano artist's paper and painted with acrylics. Here's how it looks standing up:

The pages look like they buckled a lot, but in real life it's not so bad. I think it's the effect of standing up straight. Anyway, I don't really care about that. I think it ads character. I'm cutting the images to spice up the book further and turn it into a little art journal. Maybe one I can take with me on trips. My Moon Journal is really too big to carry around.

I've also put together another book. Remember the pretty papers I shared as a freebie a few weeks ago? You can read all about them here. I now also finished the gouache papers and cut all the papers down to size. Just look at all that color! I'm just swooning as I'm writing this. ;-)

I alternated the acrylic with the gouache papers, which gives both a wonderful effect and keeps the papers from sticking to each other. Then I punched holes in them and bound them with three bookrings. Here's how this new book looks standing up.

My intention is to embellish the pages further with doodling and drawing by using paint markers and gel pens. I have no idea yet how it will turn out, but I do look forward to playing in it.

The gouache papers will soon be another freebie on this blog. I just have yet to make scans of the color copies (since the original doesn't fit on my scanner). In any case I encourage all of you to make your own pretty papers, it's such fun.

Someone asked if I would do a tutorial on them. Would anybody be interested in that? I'm not sure what to teach you about them, but I guess just showing you how I made them could be interesting. Just let me know if you would like that and I'll get on it.

Now here's another thing I'm working on. This is a picture of my work desk last Wednesday, when I didn't do a work desk post:

I call them my feltip pen girls! Can you guess why? ;-)
I made four of them and am now working on backgrounds for them which are done in gouache. I think I wil make two or three layers of paper and stitch them and add these girls to them.

I just love drawing girls. I've done it pretty much my entire life. (My school notebooks were full of them.) The funny thing is that everybody in the mixed media scene seems to be drawing girls these days and that almost makes me apprehensive to draw them myself. But I guess we should stick to what we like to do, so I'm trying not to let the fact that it's not very original anymore bother me. At least my girls look like my girls and not like anybody elses. That helps. ;-)

Now let's close off with a little bit of bragging. My blogsy pal Lynette from New Zealand wrote to tell me I was mentioned by a friend of hers in the April 2012 issue of Threads, the NZ Embroiderers Guild magazine! Look at this!

How cool is that?  Who would have thought my Easy Peasy Journal Tutorial would make it all the way over there? I'm ever so flattered! Thanks Lynette, for letting me know!

And that's it for this Wednesday. Wishing you all a very creative Wednesday too!

Moon Journal Spreads

In the past month I've had way too little time to journal. When I'm very busy and stressed the journal is still the last to go, so when I don't even make time for that you can bet that life has been extra hectic. Not the entire month mind you, but definitely longer and more than I would like.

I try to journal every day, but the past four weeks I've had times when I skipped three or four days in a row. There's nothing wrong with that in itself of course, but for me journaling is such a daily habit that when I don't do it it's like something really essential is missing, a part of me is missing.

The thing is I had some time to write, but not really to decorate the pages and somehow that just takes the will to write away too. My journal is a decorated diary, not just a diary and it feels empty to write on pages with nothing on them, at least in the journal. I have no problem writing on empty pages outside of the journal. (Weird, I know.)

But it also feels empty not to write at all, so I'm quite pleased that life is slowing down a little again. Last week was the first time I actually felt like I was getting back into a more agreeable rythm. And immediately my journal got to see me every day.

It's no secret I'm very bad at handling stress and busy times. When both work and the time outside of work are too full I get lost somewhere in between. It's like my life is living me, instead of the other way around and I really don't like that.

My level of tolerance for many appointments, visits and too long to do lists is very low. I need down time and not in a shy way. And that down time I need to spend alone. I know there's plenty of people out there who feel apprehensive about just being alone for an hour, but that's not me.

I need days. Preferably more than one. When I'm alone I get a certain sense of peace and reflection that I don't think I could ever have in the presence of anyone else, no matter how much I love them. I like my own company and I like to explore things on my own too. I've always been that way I guess. And...I'm never ever bored.

So anyway, here's the seven spreads I did manage in the past month. On normal weeks I would have done about twice as many since in this journal I fill about a page a day. But it's okay, even at a slower pace the journal will get filled eventually. And I sure do love fillling a journal!

Wishing you all a very artsy week!

Trying out some new supplies

Last week I showed you my stash of new supplies, mostly resulting from my birthday gift certificates. Well, this week I got to play with them, not all, but some. I thought I'd show you some of the results and what I thought of the materials I bought. Maybe it will shed some light on things you might be considering getting yourself.

Spraypaint for fabrics (mine are simply called Spray Color, no brand name)
I got these to see if I could use them on paper. I have a couple of bottles of glimmer mist sprays and I do like those, but the colors aren't always as bright as I would like, and they are rather expensive.  So let's see if these fabric sprays did the trick.

I took some of my stencils and just started spraying. The above picture is just a sample. I did more pages, but these illustrate that te paint is very bright and does work on paper. But what you can't see is...the paint is very sticky! You couldn't use it in a journal as is. On a canvas piece I think they would be okay, but on paper one would have to cover them with a spray varnish or something so they don't stick anymore. This need not be a problem, but it is something to consider. And of course I don't know yet how they hold up over time.
The colors seem half opaque and to my joy they are waterproof. I'm a layer person and I don't want my colors to bleed into new layers. I have not yet tried to see how they respond to layers of acrylic or other materials on top of them, so I'll have to see about that. Still I'm quite pleased with the brightness and how they look on paper. I might even try them on fabric in the future, haha.

Graphitint pencils (by Derwent)
I had four of these already before I bought the tin of twelve I now have, so I had already worked with them, but I thought it was a good time for test driving them again. What to draw? Well, my go to thing for a quick drawing where I don't have to think too much is girls' faces, so that's what I did.

I love love love these pencils! They are smooth and soft and very nice to work with. I also love the earthy tones of the colors. This drawing was also a good exercise in a little cross hatching. I'm very inexperienced with colored pencils, but I think I did okay with this one and managed to keep the face light.
The pencils are also water soluble, but I didn't want to ruin my lines by dissolving them in water. I did however use a paintbrush with water over the background of the girl. The lines you still see in the background were added later. The pencils dissolve like watercolor pencils. All in all a very good buy.

Aquatone pencils (also by Derwent)
These are watercolor pencils without a wood covering, so it's just thin long color sticks that are covered with paper to protect them. They are a little like elongated Caran d'ache neocolor II's, but you can't smudge them as easily as those. I decided to do another girl with these.

I was a little disappointed at first at how they felt when using them directly to paper. They are a lot less smooth than I hoped and don't really glide so easily over the page as the graphitints or Derwent coloursoft pencils. They almost felt like bad quality wax crayons and when you push too hard little crumbles appear. But when I used the waterbrush on them I was hooked! The colors just come alive in an amazing way and that totally makes up for any doubts I had at first. They dissolve amazingly and any lines you see above are added later to give more definition to the piece. I love how the hair of this girl looks with these pencils.
I also quickly tried on a scrap of paper if you could put a wet brush to them and then paint with them and yes you can! I love using my neocolors that way so I was happy that these can be applied like that as well.

All in all this first test of my new goodies was a success. I will of course need more practice to get the most out of all of them, but I'm glad they felt nice to use on the first try. One never knows up front what to expect for sure, so I'm pretty pleased with my birthday stash!

Hope you're having a good week. Now go be artsy!

Book review - Doodles Unleashed - Traci Bautista

Title: Doodles unleashed - mixed media techniques for doodling, mark-making & lettering
Author: Traci Bautista
Info: 128 p. - 2012
Rating: 8/10





Notes:
Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while may have noticed I like bright colors and I like to fill a page to the brim. As much as I admire people who can work in more sedate colors and in a more minimalist way I just can't seem to do it myself. So it's no surprise that Traci Bautista's work is right up my alley.

I'm saying this up front, because I wouldn't be surprised if that at least partially affected my rating of her book Doodles Unleashed. I already own her other book Collage Unleashed and this book is pretty much done in a similar format. And the format is like this: ideas, ideas, ideas and then some more ideas. That's all.

This is not so much  a book about how to form a doodle. Instead the book is like a collection of unlimited possibilities of all the things a person can do with doodles and the materials with which these doodles can be incorporated into art and journaling. For me this book is like a treasure trove full of visual stimulation and verbal inspiration, and since I love Traci's work it's also an abundance of eye candy.

I'm not sure though if this book is very well suited for beginners. Although Traci gives some step by step information, the content of this information is not very thorough. She assumes a lot of knowledge. One of the most extreme examples being the suggestions about working digitally. If you don't already know how to work with a program like photoshop those suggestions will mean nothing to you. And I think it is that way with more techniques. They are wonderful for people who have been working with mixed media for a while and don't need things explained to them anymore, but they might be a little too lacking in details for those who have never touched a paint brush before.

For me this was a plus of the book as I am really past those books that explain every detail so you can copy the work of the artist, but I think it good to mention it for those who are actually looking for those kinds of books.

Another aspect I didn't really care for was how she mentions brand names and especially her own collage pauge. I'm sure it's a wonderful product, but I'm always a little worried that people will think they need exactly those brands in order for their art to work. Get some gel medium of any good brand and you'll be fine.

I'm a little torn about the fact that she refers to her website with links to video demo's and freebies. On the one hand this is wonderful of course, but on the other I have little confidence that the weblinks will outlive the book. In five years some of those video's may no longer be available. Still it's nice that there's an interactive aspect with her website.

All that being said the book made me jump out of my seat several times and put it down, just so I could go into the studio and make something colorful. I could not just leaf through it without wanting to do something and that I think says a lot for a book about art making.

All in all this book is a wonderful addition to my collection and will probably be referred to often if I need some quick inspiration.