My own sponge adventure

Today I was down the town and went into a shop for lunch. On my way out I saw a pack of 13 sponges for 1 pound and so I bought it. They are multicolored makeup sponges (in pink, purple, white and blue). I came home and sat down to start playing with them and to watch Samantha Kira's Studio Vlog. Then what do I see? This week she is playing with sponges too. How weird is that. I thought my makeup sponges were amazingly cool to work with, they got me an awesome i smudged the paint with my fingers effect , but I did not get my hands dirty. I also found some bubble wrap and used it to create to prints and covered in paint applied with a makeup sponge. I had earlier today, drawn an Owls head. so I decided to cut it out and glue it down. I also used my red and orange shimmering H20 watercolours, a strip of patterned paper and some gelpens and pen and ink. To finish off this page, I wrote about me becoming a vegetarian. I have been for 3 weeks now and I think its fab.
Play with something cool in your journal and leave me a comment about it.





XXO MAKEALIFE

Strip Ease

click to see lArge

I enjoyed last month crusade so much, I decided to give it ago this month to. Above is my page.
First i followed the "instructions" on the site. I took a few patterned papers and paper from an old newspaper. I randomly ripped strips from the papers and glued +these down with gel medium.Next i stamped all over it using my large diamond checked stamp.
Then not quite sure how to continue I left it be for a week and worked on other pages.When i came back to it, all I did was randomly layed white gesso onto the page and then I drew a face with biro(using a magazine image as a giude to where her features should go.)I then gave her a tribal feather headpiece and then covered the excess gesso with orange paint. Lastly I cut the word adventuerer and leader of the pack from a magazine and glued it down.
:)

A quick idea. Art journaling club

Would anyone be interested in taking part in a virtual art journaling club? What would happen is every saturday one of the members creates a background and scans it in or takes a photo& posts it on their blog. Then that person continues to work on it. All the others go onto the sote, print out the background & complete it in their own way. Then we all upload our images by the end of the week & voila!!
If you are interested... Leave a comment& i will organise. :)

I have a few new products(YAY!!)....

A few days ago, I went to this amazing little craft shop, that sold so much cute stuff. It was really hard to limit myself to a few things.In the end, i left the shop with one bottle of cosmic shimmer mist, a Tim Holtz Distress Ink pad and a new paintbrush. I am also including gel medium and Gesso to this post,as I just got them a few weeks ago.
The paintbrush is a flat bristled brush in size 4: this brush is fab, you can do dry brushing with it and treat it rough, as long as the brush is cleaned properly at the end, it will last for a long time. This is my new favorite brush.
My Gel medium in gloss: is my new bestfriend. You can use it to create texture(combined with paint will add colour), its a great glue and can even be used to create image transfers,
The white Gesso: is a worthy investment and very different from acrylic paint. It can be used to cover up the whole layer underneath, but it can also be applied in such as way, that parts of the underneath layer shine through. Dry brushing works really well with this.
The Distress Ink Pad in vintage photo: is a lovely colour and so far is great to use around the edges of my journal pages.I want to do a bit more experimenting with this, as I just got it the other day.
Lastly the Cosmic Shimmer Mist in Gold is so .... well shimmery. You can use it as I have done on the journal page above, in the background to add the wow factor to your pages. I want to experiment with this as well.

Have you ever used any of these products? If so what do you think of them? Please share in a comment below.:)))

Book review and upcate: Creative Wildfire by L.K.Ludwig

I have been on a mini road trip away from the computer. I have had a lovely time, reading books and coming up with creative ideas. I bought this fabulous book and will now review it for you.

I picked this book up because it had a lovely vibrant cover page, but when I saw the title: Creative Wildfire: An introduction to art journaling-basics and beyond, I thought it would be to basic for me. I was wrong though, it is full of fab content. This book is divided into 6 chapters. I will give you a rough outline of what is in each one.

Chapter 1: gathering fuel: How to get started
This first chapter is about choosing a journal structure and the how to on a few different ways to bind an art journal.

Chapter2:
The tinderbox:page surface techniques
This chapter contains many cool and new to me techniques such as scraped paint,reductive stenciling, different ways to work with gesso, and more. Each tutorial is easy to understand and offers a million suggestions for altering the idea. This book is full of ideas.

Chapter3: Building fire: Using Imagery
Also full of ideas on ways to add imagery through collage,image transferes and new ideas such as drawing on images, printing onto tissue paper and gelatin mono printing.

Chapter4: Bursting in into flames: Creating meaningful content
ideas about sources for fodder, topic art journals,begin with masters, how to stop creative block and more.

Chapter5: Feeding the fire: adding details
Ideas on how to use text, add pockets, envelopes, tabs and embellishments.

Chapter6: Keeping the fire burning: Fueling your creativity
This is about artists dates and finding the time to be creative.

Each chapter also contains interviews with many artists such as Katie Kendrick, Teesha Moore and Misty Mawn.

This book is very inspirational and leaves me bursting with new ideas. I think it is the perfect book to bust you out of your creative blocks and is therefore essential to every art journalist.