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!