Monks little book

A couple of years ago my friend M., who is nicknamed Monkie or Monk, and I visited a gallery in Rotterdam where we saw the incredible work of Jean Tinguely. Look him up on the web, he made fantastic enormous sculptures that look like intricate machines, except they have no purpose but be art. It's wonderful to see those machines actually move and we had a wonderful time admiring his work.

Next to all these huge machines were of course smaller bits and bobs of his. Photographs, sketches, films and...letters. It was the letters that caught our attention, because they were pieces of art by themselves. He sent these beautifully illustrated notes to friends and other artists often containing sketches and a very loose handwriting that we really liked too.

Being the creative gals we are we of course were both inspired by this and before we even left the building I think both of us secretly decided to send the other some mail art. That was the start of a correspondence of art that's been going on ever since. We have no rules and no deadlines or anything. We just send something when we feel like it's about time we send something and that works just fine. There's no pressure.

I often use my mail art to do little experiments or to use materials I hardly ever use just to get a feel for them. It's a lot of fun and of course it's a lot of fun to receive Monks works of art as well. I hope we will keep it up for a long time!

As I told you in my previous post recently I received a small but lovely booklet from her containing her sketches which were mostly done during a sketching class she took and since she doesn't have a blog I asked her if it was okay to show it off on mine. So here we go!

Is that cool or what? I love handmade books and if its filled with so much personal art it's even better. So thank you again Monk!

If you want to see more of her work or her photographs please check out her flickr (which she should update more often, grumble) and her fotothing. Enjoy!



Collage Sampler

Isn't it strange how you can be in tune with friends even when you don't realise it at the time? Makes you believe in things like telepathy. I have no idea if that was the case here, but as you know I had been working on a gift for a friend who had her birthday recently. It was going to be a booklet full of collages that I have called a 'collage sampler' because I just wanted it to be all about playing with collage without any other goal than that.

While I was still very busy working on it I received a package from her as part of our ongoing mail art exchange. And what do you know? There was a booklet inside that she had made for me! Not with collages, but with sketches and writings. We had never sent each other self made booklets before so you can imagine my surprise when I found out we were both secretly working on one to surprise the other!

I think hers deserves a post all in itself, but I still have to take good pictures or scans of it so I am going to try and do that for my next post. For now I will just show you my side of this coinciding art ;-)  I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves:

Most of the materials used were scraps left over from other art pieces or just stuff I had lying around. The photographs are all my own as well and were also left over from other projects. It was fun making something from all these left overs and it also relieved some of the pressure of having to make something 'pretty' or 'good'. I know my friend is not really into pretty pretry and cute ;-)

Taking the above pictures of the sampler was quite a challenge by the way. Guess who wanted to be in every picture I took? 



First pages in the heart journal and blogger annoyance

Well, the heart journal has officially started, so I will show you the first pages I did in it. I am just working in it randomly which is really difficult for me as I am a total control freak. A part of me wants everything neatly in order and chronological. I compromise by dating every input and by keeping a chronological written journal on the side. Working outside of my usual box is always a little scary.

Here's the first page I made. Well, to be honest it's not really the very first page. The first page I did is a hommage to Teesha Moore's new journaling style, but I don't want to break any copyrights by showing you that. Just check out her blog (a link is on the right) to see it for yourself. No one does it like Teesha (though half the journaling world certainly is trying!).

So here's the first page with just my own stuff in it:

It's a page where I tested some new pencils, derwent inktense. They are like inks in a pencil form. Watersoluble, but after they dry they become waterproof, which is pretty cool. I just wanted to get a feel for them, so I made this little drawing of shapes and a tree branch. I love empty tree branches, the way they meander into smaller branches and twigs. Beautiful.

The first entry was just a one pager, but the second is a full spread.

It's a very different format when you are using a landscape oriented book and that's quite interesting to work with. The hands are photocopies of my own hands. It was hard for me to stop adding things, I wanted it to remain rather simple and uncomplicated, but I always have this tendency to want to fill every empty space! I think I did okay with this spread though! ;-)

Now for something completely different: am I the only one who wants to smack the blogger people for the troubles with uploading images? Assuming of course I am not the only one having these troubles? Just putting these two images in today is costing me years of my life. Why can't they just fix this stuff? I've even had to put this post on hold because I couldn't get the pictures uploaded the first time. It should not take an hour and a half to do a small post like this. This is driving me crazy, blogging shouldn't be this annoying!

More background love

I keep working on the backgrounds in an A4 sketchbook that I am turning into some sort of art journal. I've already shown the first pages in one of my previous posts and today I want to show you some more.

I could just make these all day long (if only I had the time and no other artsy loves). All the paper used is by K&Company. I still have about 10 pages to go in this sketchbook and then I have to decide what exactly I am going to do with it. I know it will be some kind of journal, but that's just about all I know right now. We'll have to wait and see where the muse takes me ;-)

Scenes from the everyday journal

As promised here are some spreads from the everyday journal that I just finished. About 90% of the journal looks like the first two spreads. Lots of writing with my photographs pasted in. Sometimes instead of photogaphs I'll glue in postcards I like or magazine pictures. But using your own photographs does feel more authentic.

Sometimes I just need to blow of steam. Be it in a negative or in a positive way. Then you get pages like in the next two spreads. Ugly, but very functional ;-)

And sometimes I will just fill a spread with pictures or a collage of pictures. This happens rarely, but it looks nice when it does.

And just every now and then I will actually do something that may be considered somewhat artsy in my journal. Like this random collage I did of remnants that were left at my work table after working on a project:

Well, there you have it. The everyday journal in all it's glory! Hope you enjoyed it ;-)