Boiled Books

It all began with a beautiful day at the beach,
we met at Brooms Head for a home school day looking at marine life and exploring the rock pools, it was such a fabulous day, and we saw the whales . I was so excited.

I came home with a bucket full of sea weeds and plants from beach combing.

and used them to create a boiled book.

 This was my first attempt after watching this fabulous series of videos

My pages are beautiful but I think I was too chunky with my plant matter  and quite a few of my pages ended up torn and ripped.

The patterns and details are so beautiful, delicate and I got quite a range of colours.

It is jacaranda time here and my town of Grafton in northern NSW is a purple haze this time every year and on my morning walk today I started thinking about doing another book so I collected some leaves and flowers and hurried home.

I was much quicker putting this one together for the dye pot.

I also made sure I used a thin layer of leaves and flowers 

and kept my pages in a neat stack within the edges of my tiles.

I added some dark green dye to the pot this time as well 

The pages are very different 

and I love them 

I cant wait for them to dry

 so I can bind them together into a new book.

They almost look like xrays 

and when held up to the light you can see colours inside the pages.

Art Box - Felt making in the park

We had such a lovely workshop out at Copmanhurst last week, our local council The Clarence Valley Council has a fabulous program tied into our skate parks where they have 3 converted shipping crates that travel around the valley offering different activities and workshops to locals and visitors for free.

I am one of the local artists working out of the Art Box 

and I have just started offering felt making workshops.

We had a great turn out with

 lots of boys and girls and mums joining in on the fun 

and getting some  exercise in the fresh air. 

We kept it quite simple making balls, beads and ropes that will be sliced when they dry into a different type of bead.

Everyone chose lovely bright colours and the beads all turned out so different from each other.

River Flow

Big things are happening in this river girls life right now.
 I have bought a house in town, with my girlfriend Kathy, and the boys and I have moved in. The new house is fabulous and still on my beloved river and offers so many opportunities to us all.  Moving was epic and overwhelming and we are almost finished bringing our things to the new house now we just need to sort everything out and settle in. 

The animals have all been moved and have settled in well, the parrots were the easiest and the poodle, Indi is very mobile and adaptable. The 2 cats Minx and Domino have settled in mostly but they still dont like each other and they dont like going from bush cats free to roam out at our old place to town cats confined to the house. They will soon be getting a catio built for them to have access out into an enclosed area out the back. The chooks have also made the move and they didn't miss a beat and kept on laying eggs right through.

The really exciting thing about moving into town
 and buying this house in particular is I am opening an art studio downstairs where I will be running lots of different classes and workshops. There is still a lot of work to do before the studio opens but we are here and taking it one step at a time. I am studying a certificate 4 in small business starting next week and starting the renovations downstairs as soon as I can. 

The bad thing about all of this is I have been so busy I have not been able to get any art done really and most of my art materials are packed away. So I am not very active at all over in our fabulous Australian Art Swap Group on facebook  and I have opted out of the next round of the Australian Art Journal Swap but if you pop over to the blog you will see the beautiful journals developing.

Fay Boyds Fine Art School

I am off for a week of study at Fay Boyds Fine Art School  
I am taking a drawing class with Linda Weil  and we are drawing animals wild and tame. 

Both of those adjectives sum up Miss Cobalt,

I wonder if she would like to come too.

Pop over to Linda's site and have a look at her stunning works.

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Turns out both Cobalt and Azure are indeed coming on Tuesday :)

Day 1-

White on Black

The months are rapidly creeping by we are already into our April ATC swap over at the Australian Art Swap Group and what a great theme we have this month-

~White on Black~

I played with simple zentangling with my tried and trusted signo white pens and I am ready for the swap- if you would like to join us pop over and send me a message on our Facebook Group

The Australian Art Swap Group.

Purging

Brain Dump

The last few years I have been so overwhelmed,
I have a lot of sad and stressful things happening, however
I am determined to get through it all this year.

One way I have been managing things is to purge all of my emotions and worries and cares onto my pages, sometimes I do that through imagery and that can express what I am feeling, sometimes I might even share those pages, but quite often lately I have had dark and angry, scared and sad things to express and while I do want to get them out I don't really want to revisit them myself or to share them with others. So I use different ways of hidden journaling.

Sometimes I journal out my heart and then simply cover it up- with gesso or collage, sometimes I just paint over the top of it or I might keep turning the page around 90 degrees and then write completely over the page full of writing like I did in the page above, there are 4 layers of brain dumping there, all at right angles to the one below and eventually  they become unreadable apart from the odd word if you really look.

I have been art journalling for years now
just think of all the money I have saved on therapists.

Happy Mail

To give and to receive

it is one of the real joys of living, 

I get real pleasure in creating art for other people and getting happy mail in the post in among the bills and junk mail flyers is such a treat.

We recently had a lovely fun swap over at the
Australian Art Swap Group 

It was a supplies and ephemera swap,
we needed to fill and envelope with things we wanted to share
then our packages were sent all over Australia 

to bring joy and inspiration to each other.

It is amazing just how much can fit in one of these envelopes
and how much fun it is

 to include some art from our online friends in our own work.

We have lots of different swaps and not just for the big kids,
these ATCs were made by my 11 yo son and I,

Making your own Stamps

I really enjoy creating my own stamps and stencils to use in my art,

I love that it is another layer made from my hand 

and that I have repeating elements used in many ways in my work.

 

I use various different materials to make my stamps,

the owl is carved from a commercial stamp carving block and 

the chevrons above were drawn and carved by my 11 yo son

using a giant eraser from the supermarket bought for $2. 50

These stamps were made using layers of craft foam,

these stamps can be made very simply by drawing directly onto the foam with a heavy hand, I do periodically redraw the designs on my growing collection of these stamps as they get filled with paint but they are also very easy to repair in this way and a pack of 100 sheets of craft foam enables you to make a huge amount of stamps. I love using these for printmaking.

Birds are a perennial theme with me and I have loads of bird stamps

they can really make a journal page pop,

using them just with some ink of paint

or using them as a base (I stamp with white gesso)

then painting your bird as elaborately as you desire.

DLP Update

Sharing a few more journal pages from DLP 

This page was week 7 working with layers 

and the prompt was to cover up the good stuff

My page got buried under the éarth'.

Week 8 still working with layers  and the theme was repeating elements,

I worked with the spiral and circular nature of human behaviours.

More playing with layers I did 2 pages for week 9

Use at least 5 layers.

The journal prompt for week 9 was "Give Me a high five"

So I used 5 layers, 5 colours, 5 mediums and 5 birds.

I have a much loved girlfriend who works in the city and often escapes her tall building at lunch time and relaxes in a secret garden on Sydney Harbour, this page reminds me of her, even though she does not need the reminder.

Printmaking Spree

Sometimes a girl just has to break out the gelli plate and play.

I have had a bit of a print making spree lately and have been working with a limited palette each time and trying to do as many different things as can in each session.

It is so much fun and so relaxing and I love the results.

I have been working in long strips that I then fold into pages and will eventually bind them together into an art journal, very much inspired by Teesha Moores Amazing 16 page journals. At the moment though I am really enjoying working in the loose leaf format.  Thanks to my friend Maisy for giving me the idea.

I have found it easy to grab a few supplies and a few pages and take them with me when I need to wait at places, with the backgrounds already done I often find something inspiring to start me off or I just find a background that suits my purpose.