Creative Block?! GET YOUR WARPAINT ON!!!!!

Over the past two or three days I have just been sitting round reading magazines and watching youtube videos on how to sew clothes( yes I want to try) instead of acctually creating anything. I did do the picture above in my art journal, but it is horrible!!!!Ans more importantly I made myself do it and it was not fun. It is time to rise up and put some warpaint on ( aka liquid eyeliner) and get creative.
First let's go onto iHanna's art journaling catagory and see what ideas that gives us...
Hmmm... Maneki Neko Sketch ,
Sounds fun huh? So I went on google and found a cool pic of this cat and drew it.

Better than the girl painting and it was fun!!YAY!! So my tip for creative block: Go onto one of your fave art journaling websites, pick a post they did that looks fun and for which you have all the supplies, turn the music up and start mindlessly working.And voila!!!
At the moment I am really into japan, so i did a bit of research about this cat.
Basically:
Maneki Neko: means Beckoning Cat aka Welcoming Cat, Lucky Cat, Money Cat and fortune Cat.
The raised paw is not a greeting, but has a meaning. If the left paw is raised it means the statue or image will bring customers into a shop( they are commonly placed outside shops for this reason)and if the right paw is raised, it means wealth and good luck. A lot of people think that, the higher the cats paw is raised , the greater Luck or the greatest distance good fortune will come from.The cat normaly has a red collar, which may be red because it reminds of the red flower hichirmen, which was popular during the Edo period when it was first created( 1603-1867) and a bell and/or bib. The bib may be something to do with the bib which grateful parents are said to give to Jizo Botsatu, the protector of sick children.
The histiory of this cat is mysterious. It could be because emperors and other important people say that someone passed a cat, that was waving at him. thanks to being distracted by this cat, the man did not walk into a trap. Thats why cats are considered wise and lucky spirits.

I can't argue with cats being wise and lucky spirits!
I got the info from Wikipedia, there you can also read about the 3 legends around the actual cat statue.

So that did it for me. How do you go to war with your creative block?

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.

End of week round up 25.6.2010

My latest journal pages( check out and try the photo mono printing, if you want me tp post a tutorial on photo mono printing, just leave a comment,)

Hello
First of have a lovely summer!!! The warm weather has just kicked in for good where I live, so i hope this will open a whole new door to my creativity: getting inspiration from the great outdoors.

But for today I want to bring you all the creative things that have been passing my mind lately. first of all this amazing video by journalgirl, about reflecting on your day is super inspiring when you need a topic to journal about and it has already made my art journal more true and juicy.


Click to make the above image bigger, it was inspired by her video:
www.ustream.tv/recorded/7661471

Then these two links have a lot of potential: how to make flowers to use in art and a magazine canvas. Check them out.

The photo mono printing journal page is also my Grid page prompted by GPP Street team prompt. I just created a grid around my photo mono print, which I had doodled on and then in each grid a drew, doodled or wrote the first thing that came into my mind. This was a cool exercise.(click on the yellow journal page at the top to get a bigger picture).

To finish off some ideas on my todo list:

1. a journal page in red
2. create a zine about animal rights
3. make and use some homemade clay
4. Make some artists trading cards
5. Art outside
6.work on my secret journal house(i will be sharing my slow progress soon.)

Have fun!!!
One last question to every one plaese leave a comment with the answer, I will post a comment with my answer in it:
What is your all time fave art supply and why?