Wanderlust week 6 - Amanda Grace's class "The love letter"

The Love Letter.

It's been busy weeks! My husband had his birthday, we've been ill, we've been fixing tons of stuff and we've also been taking some time together. The result of all this: Not much time for painting or art journaling...

I didn't make anything on Wanderlust week 5, I'll skip that one, at least for now. I'm a bit behind! Activities week 8 are already up, but I have no intention to rush this! I'll take my time.

Here's the result of the class from Amanda Grace on Wanderlust week 6. It's called "The love letter" and was really fun to do. I love to write, and this is something I've been telling my husband before, but it was really nice to get it down in an art journal, together with the photo(s) from our wedding.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, Faramir is a fictional character appearing in The Lord of the Rings.

My husband comes from a white city and he's scarily much like Faramir in character. He knows his plants, but he's not as much into healing plants or medicine as Faramir... but he is an ecologist who has been known to wear down a pair of wellingtons of high quality, in a very short time, by climbing around in nature a bit too much. He's just as home beside a campfire as in a posh hotel. He isn't interested in power. At all.

And he looks like Faramir! (At least he looks like the Faramir in my copies of The Two Towers and Return of the King!) :D

And yes, I own a sword. But I haven't killed any Ringwraith with it - yet.

Wanderlust week 4 - Challenge #1. Narnia themed January art journaling!

Week 4 is the activity week over at Wanderlust 2017. I participate in the Challenge #1. Here is the result!

I started out by choosing the three colours: dark blue, purple and green.
And then with my January impressions...
I used masks, gesso, sprays, coloured pens, modeling paste, stamps, I painted, I wrote, I added stickles, silks... and it just turned to Narnia in my head. Narnia under the Witch Queen's rule... And I started to long to Narnia - adventures and change... and maybe getting to meet Aslan in the spring, if just for a brief moment. (I've heard that where he walks, the snow melts!)

Wanderlust week 3 - Wilna Furstenberg's class "Journal Pages - 3 ways". Page 2 and 3 (of 3).

Page 2 - It's really hard to know how it works until you try! These two pages have a problem fitting together, I should have chosen something else than words as a structure on the first page... Of course!

Page 3 - Much darker. This is a technique that I can see myself using a lot! Need to practise, though!

Finally!
This took some time!

Now, the last pages of Wilna Furstenburg's Wanderlust class from last week is finally being published!

Using the same image three times is easy, once you've drawn it, but I still found this lesson very demanding, because it's all new techniques to me. Working away, going through stages of colorful mess that (at least in my case) turns worse and worse, until it just suddenly clears up.

It IS magic, of its own kind!

"Trust the process!" is what Finnabair told me when I was attending her class almost a year ago. It's a very good advice! It's very much "process" in this type of art - and it almost always goes through an icky stage (as one of my fellow Wanderlusters put it, pretty much spot on).

It is hard to know when to stop. Should I go on or is this it? Usually I know, but with this I don't have much experience. It's interesting! It's good to learn new things!

This is very different from my usual stuff - and that's the point!

Canvas - Kaz Brekker of Ketterdam

Kaz, his cane with a crow head and Ketterdam. Do you recognize "his" house?

This is something I wanted to do since I finished reading Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, that means I've been planning this canvas for a month... (Crooked Kingdom was released right before Christmas 2016.)

Leigh Bardugo's books are fantastic, if you've not read them yet - you're in for such a treat! The duology Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom have to be read together. (But please start from the very beginning with Shadow and Bones, Siege and Storm and the last book in the first trilogy - Ruin and Rising!)


But this canvas is in honour of Kaz Brekker.

The Crowhead!

I've been using the same tecniques as Finnabair, but for the first time I am doing it my way.

Some of the stuff I've used:
Man and Wife die (PTI)
Finnabair 12x12 Black Resist Canvas Sheet: City Map (Prima)
A selection of Finnabair Mechanicals (Prima)
Silks (Luminarte)
Micro Beads Black (Prima)
Art stones - small and big (Prima)
White Gesso
Black Gesso
Block Alphabet: Celtic lowercase alphabet set (unknown brand, 2001)
Freaky fabric
Tim Holtz - Stampers anonymus: 064 Mini Ornates
Inkylishious - Silhouette town
Black paper roses
Liquid pearls

Wanderlust week 3 - Wilna Furstenberg's class "Journal Pages - 3 ways". Page 1 of 3.

Oh my! This was a tough lesson! (Drawing with a brush, using ink. It's scary!) Wilna made it look so easy, and it's not! I have a huge problem with not making mud out of all the colours... (That seems to be my biggest problem with this course, so far!)
Anyhow.
My journal page. A letter to my daugher. From me, here and now- to her, in the future.

Wanderlust week 2 - Making Magic or Where You Find the Unicorn

My canvas from week 2 of Wanderlust. 30x30 cm.

This is my canvas from week 2 of Wanderlust, from our lesson by Mary Wangerin called "Making Magic".
(The quote is from Roald Dahl: "Those who don't believe in magic will never find it".)

I think this lesson was the hardest lesson I've ever done! I felt a million times that this won't be publishable at all. Filling the canvas with paint, over and over and over, tissue paper, coloured paper (with and without strucucture) and continuing.... (The hardest thing is not getting everything muddled up!)
But the magic happened... and then it just took over. (I'm sorry, I couldn't help all this painting! It just happend!) But that's the magic that happens when you paint! Some call it inspiration. Sometimes it just starts with lots of hard work. Like now. But it did happen!

My first art journaling page(s) ever

Melim (in Hebrew) means words. Words are magical. They make stories come to life... but how do they work?

Last year, I tried something new. I made an art journal cover (as you can see in a previous post), but I thought I had to try out making pages too!
These are the first two pages in my art journal, made last autumn (2016). Being totally new at this, I (mainly) followed the steps from this tutorial from Finnabair's blog.