ROD2 completed

I know, I promised you the conclusion of ROD2 for yesterday, but life got in the way, so today's the day!  Better a little late than never, right? Right! ;-)

About a week ago I finished my second Remains of the Day Journal and today I'll show you the last spreads and how the journal now looks standing up and brimming with stuff. As before you will get the before and after pictures. Here we go!

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Well, that's all folks! I'm proud to have filled it up so well, but I'm sad to see it go, even though of course it's not really going anywhere, since I'll cherish it forever. I just won't work in it on a day to day basis anymore, so I will miss it. But...my new journal, the in between journal, is already on its way and I will show you more about that one soon and look forward to that. I'm also working on a tutorial based on that journal, so stay tuned!

I hope you enjoyed watching ROD2 get filled and I also hope you will have a wonderful artsy week.

(PS, thanks for the responses to my last post. I'm thinking about which option I like best and will get back to you on that. I do aim to make commenting as easy as possible, but that has to go for myself too, haha.)

To verify or not to verify? To verify!

Just a little in between message from me to you.

Those of you who have been commenting on my blog may have noticed I took the word verification off for a while. I know that word verification stumps some people from responding at all (I don't really get this, but so be it), so I figured I would make it easier on you and take the verification off and see how I liked it. After all it seems like more and more people take the verification off and they seem to be faring well.

Well...after about five days of it I can safely say: I don't like it at all! Hello spammers! Blogger has a pretty good spam filter and doesn't publish the spam messages, but...it does send them to my mailbox where I check regularly to see if there are any comments on my blog. It's not fun when you happily open another comment just to find another spam message up there. If it was just once in a while I wouldn't mind so much, but when the amount of spam equals the amount of real comments it becomes pretty annoying.

So commenting blogsy people, you will have to go through the trouble of typing in a fake word (aren't those a hoot?) and clicking on a mouse. It's not rocket science and it really shouldn't take more than a second of your time. Hope you understand.

Finally: if anybody knows of a way to stop blogger from mailing the spam messages to my mailbox while still sending me the real comments I'm open to learning new things, 'cause that would be wonderful. (I don't want to take the sending of comments to my mailbox off completely, because that's how I keep in touch with the comments in the first place.)

And that's it for now, so...get back to being artsy!

What are you up to Wednesday - part 35 (woyww 138)

Can you believe it's Wednesday again already? Where did the week go? Sometimes it feels like I just blink my eyes once and woosh, another Wednesday has come around! Somehow these woyww posts make me very aware of the quickly passing time.

Now, without further philosophical ado, let's look at my workdesk!

What you see is the result of my altered atlas not being ready for use by far as my next journal. As I told you in my last post, my ROD2 journal is almost full (I will probably finish it tomorrow). Now I need something to get me over the time between my current journal and the new altered atlas. So, I sat down to do a quicky journal.

This is the inside of the journal without the extra's I'm currently adding. This is so easy to do and very fast too.  This took about half an hour! All you need is a piece of household sponge, some watercolor or gouache and a bowl of water. I took a lot of pictures and may yet do a tutorial on how to really quickly prep a journal this way. But that's for another time.

The journal is actually a little sketchbook I bought at the National Gallery in London. It depicts one of my favorite paintings, which is Lake Keitele by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. As you can see I have very disrespectfully drawn right over the painting and the back of the book with a black marker and a white paint marker. I didn't want to make the painting unrecognizable, but I did want to add a little personal touch. As you can see I called this journal, very aptly, "The In Between Book". ;-)

Right now I'm adding little tags and pockets to the journal pages with washi tape and then it will be ready for use. It will be a simple journal and I have no idea yet how the pages will look when I start filling it up. But I'll be sure to keep you posted on that!

Wishing you all a very artsy Wednesday!

ROD2 continued

I have only a few more spreads to go before ROD2 is finished. I enjoy this journal so much and it's really a pity it's almost full (I think I say that about all my journals though). Plans for another one are already in my head and I'm thinking of making my next ROD journal in a square format of 8x8. We'll see. ;-)

Today you get to see another series of spreads. These were made around the holidays and my vacation. As before there will be before and after pictures to give you an idea of what I added while journaling. Hope you enjoy these spreads, I certainly enjoy the comments I get on this journal from all of you!

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Keep in mind that many of the cards and photo's I added can be lifted and have writing on the back. Sometimes a little tab or card that you can lift can be very handy to hide words you don't want everybody to read. Which doesn't mean there are deep dark secrets stored behind every picture though! ;-)

Next monday I will probably be able to show you all the rest of ROD2, since I'm hoping to finish this journal this week. By that time I also hope to have a new journal lined up. It will probably not be the next altered atlas yet, because I still have way too much to do on that one before it's ready for use. So it will be a surprise, to me as well, what I will use next. I'll keep you posted.

For now I wish all of you a wonderful and artsy week!

Playing with gouache and a brush pen

I spent more time in my studio during my recent vacation than on most of my vacations, but I did find I couldn't do anything too concrete, too specific. I just wanted to play around and not really make anything. I used my studio book for this.

It just so happens that I also was reading Quinn McDonalds book 'Raw Art Journaling' of which I intend to do a book review sometime soon. It's a nice book with simple ideas about filling journal pages with marks and shapes and words. There I saw the idea of ribbons on a journal page (hers look very different by the way).

This sort of got the juices flowing for me and I started to draw lines with a brush pen and filling them in with gouache. I love my gouache box, because of the bright opaque colors. I didn't mix any color for these drawings, they came straight out of the box.

Once I had some lines on paper I started drawing other shapes and I filled some of the pages fully with color. But I liked the ribbons best. There's something very relaxing about them and they are beautiful too.

I also got to thinking about my word for 2012. I never had a word before, always resolutions that were way too ambitious. I had first chosen FUN, but then I read a quote with the word FLAMBOYANCE in it and I really loved how that sounded. It's like fun for the more experienced.  ;-) So I filled a page with a mind map about that and featured the word in a drawing to see if it would fit me.

After trying some plain ribbon drawings I started adding circles. Don't ask me why, it just seemed like a good idea. And I like how it changes the images and makes them come even more alive.

I still have no idea what these drawings mean, or even if they mean anything, but they sure are fun to do. It's just playing with colors and a brushpen and it's so relaxing. I'm sure I will make many more of these in the future.

I wish all of you a wonderful and artsy weekend!