Writing in the Quinn Book - a little envelope tutorial

When I went on my personal little art retreat during the holidays I knew I wanted to write and I knew I wanted to write a lot. You may think that I do a lot of writing already in my journals (I know you do), but I really wanted to write everyday for as long as I possibly felt like it. And since words always flow from my pen like water from a faucet I knew that I couldn't be confined by a journal spread to do so. For example, here's what I wrote in one stretch on one typical day:

At that rate if I wrote directly into the Quinn Book it would not only be filled without any art, it would even be too small! So I decided on an alternative. I wrote on simple notebook paper and would figure out along the way how to ad the writing to the final journal.

During the vacation I remembered I still had a whole stack of beautiful old folk art calendars that were given to me by my cousin. So I decided to pick one and make beautiful envelopes out of them. That was pretty easy. The imagery was gorgeous. All I had to do was cut and fold. Here's the result:

The only thing I added to them was the date of the writing in marker, so I would know when I wrote that particular entry. To keep things even more simple I just added the envelopes to the Quinn book in the left over spreads with a paper clip. I didn't feel it needed anything more than that. All I wanted was just to keep the writing and art of one vacation together and this worked fine enough for me. 

Now as a little bonus I thought I'd show you how to make your own pretty envelopes. It's really easy and fast and it really ads a little something special to your snail mail (or journal).

PRETTY ENVELOPE TUTORIAL

What you need:
- any beautiful sturdy paper you want to make an envelope out of
- one unused envelope that you want to emulate (there are also templates available online)
- a pen or pencil
- scissors
- glue
- a ruler
- an embossing pen or anything else you can emboss a fold with

The last two are not necessary, but I find they really help in keeping the folds straight.

For the Quinn book I used an old calendar, but for this tutorial I used a torn atlas page (left over from my altered atlas journals).

Carefully fold open the envelope you want to use as a template.

Trace the open envelope on the 'inside' part of the paper. Then cut it out. Make sure the right side is up.

Now with a ruler and embossing pen I like to mark the folds. It makes the folding so much easier.

 

Fold the envelope and glue the sides together.

And voilá! There's your brand new envelope!

If you want to make a lot of envelopes I would suggest making a more sturdy template out of cardstock or acetate before you start tracing. Ready made envelopes will not hold up to constant tracing, they are too flimsy. But for a small set it will do.

Of course you can also use your own decorated paper or decorate an envelope of ready made paper much further before you fold it. You can paint, collage, draw, stitch. Anything you like to ad a personal touch.

Hope I gave you a nice idea for your journal or mail art!

Wishing you a wonderful and artsy Wednesday!

The Midwinter Journal 2012/2013 aka The Quinn Book - part two

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and are looking forward to the second installment of the Quinn Book that I filled in my vacation. (You can read why it's called that in my previous post.)

While I was working in this book I discovered that I really enjoyed using stencils and materials in a different way than the obvious one. I love using premade art supplies (there is so much gorgeous stuff out there), but I don't like a premade look, so it became my challenge to get a bit of an abstract layout with ready made supplies. It was a lot of fun to play that way and definitely something I want to explore further. You know...with the thousand other things I want to explore further some time someday somehow. ;-)

So here's some more spreads!

This is my absolute favorite spread in the entire book!

I never thought of using rub ons and a circle template this way before.

I don't know if you can tell, but the clothes on these paper dolls are cut out from paper. These were done from stencils too.

Gouache (Talens) and brush pen (Pitt), hello my darling circles and ribbons!

The rose stickers were actually intended to stick on your bike!

I don't know if you can read it, but it says "The child is always hungry". Ain't that the truth! ;-)

 

I had a lot of trouble getting this one right, but it worked out in the end.

 

The card on the left was made by my friend Chanou. A little origami christmas tree!

And that concludes the artsy part of the journal. As I said last time I also added a bunch of photographs, but those were hard to take a snapshot of, since the glare was too prominent. I filled the book about two thirds with images and art. The rest of the book has been reserved for my writing. How I did that I will show you coming Wednesday!

Until then I wish all of you a wonderful and artsy week!

The Midwinter Journal 2012/2013 aka The Quinn Book - part one

Not long before the holidays the wonderful Quinn McDonald and I decided on a journal trade. I really wanted to try the bound Strathmore Mixed Media Journals (which are hard to come by here) and she offered to send me one free of charge. Of course I had to reimburse somehow for such generosity and so I offered her one of my favorite Seawhite of Brighton sketchbooks in return. And wouldn't you know it, her journal arrived just after Christmas, like a little belated Christmas gift.

The thing is that my days off before Christmas had been rather lazy and unproductive and that's exactly how I wanted them, but I knew that I didn't want to spend my entire vacation that way. So I decided to  take a sort of personal art and writing retreat. I'll talk about the writing in a later post, but it's safe to say that the Strathmore journal seemed just perfect to record my artsy endeavours for the nine days I had off after Christmas. So I practically immediately started working in it and am happy to say it was put to good use.

In this post and the next one I will show you some of the spreads from that book which I really wanted to call The Midwinter Journal, but which in my mind somehow has simply become The Quinn Book. ;-)

I'm not showing you all the spreads, because some of them just have large prints of my photographs on them and since those were printed on shiny paper I couldn't photograph them well (too much reflection) and anyway, you've seen most of them in my Monday post already. 

Here we go!

The card on the left was made by Quinn. A little background info on how I received the journal.

Some doodles done with Derwent graphitint pencils.

The wrappings of the half pans of watercolor in my new watercolor box.

ARTIST will be my word of the year 2013! The tree I sketched en plein air while on one of my walks.

A mandala flower in drawing pen (Pitt), coloured in with felt tip pens (Stabilo 68).

Watercolour doodles (My watercolors are Winsor and Newton by the way).

Watercolour wall with some 'framed'  photographs I took on my walks.

And again. It was fun coming up with different frames.

I actually developed a new to me style of journaling! I used stencils and supplies in a whole new way and loved it.

The Strathmore journal is absolutely wonderful, although as you can see it does not stay open very well without the help of my fingers. That's okay when working in it (it does flatten okay when you're using it), but it was a pain when wanting to take photographs (hence the tips of my lovely fingers in just about every picture).

The beautiful heavy paper takes every medium quite well, but I must say, that even though the surface was vellum (which I thought should be very smooth, but I might be wrong), a thin drawing pen and even my pentel pocket brush did have the tendency to skip a little as if the surface was too rough for them. It wasn't a problem, but I wouldn't use this paper if I just wanted to sketch with a drawing pen. For mixed media it's ideal though.

I hope you liked this first installment of spreads from the Quinn Book. The other spreads I will show you on Monday. For now I wish you a wonderful and artsy weekend!

Guest post on Create Mixed Media

Yay! I have another guest post on the wonderful site Create Mixed Media. Ricë Freeman Zachery asked me to write about my experiences with being what she calls 'bilingual'. Why does a Dutch woman blog in English and what does it mean for my art? I discuss my personal English language history in this post.

Hope you enjoy it! 

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy Wednesday!

 

I'm back with some holiday slides!

Hello blogsy people and a happy new year to you all! May 2013 be filled with wonder and joy and may it bring you everything you hoped and a little more than you expected. 

I'm back after a wonderful couple of weeks and especially the last week was fantastic. It was like having a private retreat at my own home and island. I got so much time to write and read and walk and make art and also to just sleep whenever I felt like it. It was fabulous.

I put my online presence on hold, unsubbed from discussion groups and did not participate on facebook or check other people's blogs. I can totally recommend doing this from time to time. It's good to just get back to yourself. I had a lot of time to think and I needed it.

But all things (good and bad) must come to an end, so today I started my job again and have returned to the online existence and the great world outside my private space. I'm now way behind on everything, so the coming week I will play catch up as much as I can. And of course I am back on the blog (but I guess you noticed that).

Let me give you a photographic impression of the past time.

Foggy City of Leeuwarden

A brand new table cloth for the journaling table (my assistant ruined the other one).

Christmas at Casa Caatje. ;-)

What I wish was Casa Caatje (but it's not, sigh).

A window display I really liked.

Introducing old paint box to new paint box (they got along just fine).

Depressed pine needles.

One of the many roads I walked.

Ah, the magic of sand moving across the beach. So beautiful.

Patterns left by shells and sand.

My shadow taking a nap in the hay.

"Freedom"

A helpful tree pointing out the right way to go.

Bare trees, I keep loving them.

My artsy endeavors all in one book.

Quiet beauty on the last day of my vacation.

I never get tired of the beauty of the place I call home.

Of course I took many many more pictures, but I have to draw the line somewhere. The picture of the journal above is a bit of a teaser for my next posts in which I will show you what I did art wise in my vacation. I was pretty productive if I do say so myself. Hope you come back to take a peek.

Until then I just want to say it's good to be back and wish you a wonderful and artsy week!