Living Beings - New Challenge at Art Journal Journey

Hi everybody!

We had another grey and wet day here, I was not the only one out for a Sunday walk with wellies!

Today is the start of a new challenge over at Art Journal Journey, 'Living Beings', and I have the honour of playing hostess again. 

I have decided to concentrate my efforts for 'living beings' this month on the work of Beatrix Potter, whose magical work was an important part of my childhood. I still have the complete set of Peter Rabbit books, and they are one of the things which I will never part with. She was a very talented painter and illustrator, whose work hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, and painted all her creatures with great love and respect. I am sure many of you will have seen the wonderful film of her life with Renee Zellweger, 'Miss Potter'. If you are interested you can read more about her life here (English) or here (German).

I want to try to show some of the living beings she created this month, and try to paint or draw some of my own. Your creativity has no limits, you can interpret the theme as you want, with art journaling about any things that live or have lived – unleash your creativity and show us what you can do!

For my piece I painted an A3 page with water colours, and sprinkled on a bit of the wonderful bistre powders sent to me by a friend, and this gave a great grungy look. I fussy cut my characters and put them in scene, together with a photo of Beatrix Potter, watching over her creations. I had great fun making this, and hope you will have fun creating your pages and sharing your living beings at Art Journal Journey.

On rainy and misty days the landscape seems to just dissolve in the distance

The horses were busy grazing as always

And I met this little mouse on my way home, very fitting for today's theme!  The photos are rather grainy, it was dark under the trees where she was scurrying around looking for food

Have a great day, take care, and thanks a lot for coming by!

Bye bye Frida and more....

Hi everybody!

Hope you are enjoying your weekend.

Today started out friendly, but got progressively greyer and darker and wetter. There is a 'Summer Night' festival in our little town tonight, so I am sorry that the weather is not playing fair!

Now it's time for the last Frida page. I have lost count of how many pages I made, but it was more or less one a day. It was a great month, and now I am looking forward to the new challenge! Here I have used Andy Skinner's beautiful Freebie.

I am linking, once again, to Art Journal Journey!

Today I felt like making another witchy tag. I used one of the large Kraft tags that dear Sandy sent me, distressed it with DIs in Victorian velvet and old paper, and then soaked it and scrunched it. When it was dry I embossed it in a texture folder, inked it, and embossed it with silver to look like a spider's web. I stamped some TH skeletons partially onto the background with archival black. The witch and cat were stamped and clear embossed. I stamped the witch a second time onto transparent foil, and placed it over the stamped witch to give her more definition. I added some Halloween creepy crawlies, black fibres, and some witch-hair - not from me! -  as embellishments. A spare broom and a little skull rounded it all off. I am linking to Simon's Monday Challenge, Witchcraft

Today started off well, but the good weather was gone very quickly

I took a photo of Miss Spider devouring her prey today, not easy, as I am scared of spiders, but I did it and I survived - so did the spider!

And Autumn is on its way, the leaves are falling....

Have a great day, take care, 

and thanks a lot for coming by!

Frida, witchcraft, horses and more

Hi everybody!

I was intending to get such a lot done today, but somehow the time ran away and I could not catch up with it. In addition, the weather was nice although we had been promised rain, so I spent a lot of time outside enjoying it. I will have to catch up on other things when the weather is really bad!

Today is almost the last Frida piece - the very last one will be shown tomorrow. I have enjoyed this challenge very much, and was really happy that so many other people joined in and made such wonderful and varied journal pages about Frida. Thanks to all who joined in!

This is one I made a couple of weeks back.  I used a charcoal sketch which I painted/splashed and smeared with yellow and red paint. I called it Danza al sol, sun dance, which is the title of one of Frida's paintings.

Linking to Art Journal Journey

and to Paint Party Friday

At Simons Monday challenge the theme this week is witchcraft, so I made a spooky card. I love everything witchy and  spooky and enjoyed making this. The picture of the rather bewitched looking doll has been printed onto canvas. I used various papers for backing, and added some of my home made autumn leaves and a TH die-cut bird as embellishments. The feathers and beads 'appeared' on my table after clearing the layers above them away....

The horses were in a social mood today - or was it just the carrots which lured them to the fence? 

The second batch of sunflowers is blooming:

And the water and the sky fascinate me as always with their ever changing appearance:

Here's wishing you all a great weekend, take care,

and thanks a lot for coming by!

Frida, a WIP and another sunrise

Hi everybody!

Hope you day has been good! We had sunshine and blue skies all day, and tomorrow should be the same, but then the rain will come back again!  Had to jump over a lot of puddles on my walks today, the paths are all very muddy after the rain.

Today I have another Frida journal page / collage. The background is a print of my fave Mexican postcard. I painted it with watered down gesso, and then coloured it a bit with oil pastels. The collage pieces were the last remnants left from clearing up my table last week, and I think they fit well together. I used some vintage ledger paper from 1925 in the background, and some washi tape and paper lace as embellishments. And the faux stitching is from a sheet of rub-ons, which also emerged from the chaos on my table. And why did I put the stitching on? No idea, but somehow I liked it.

I am linking to Art Journal Journey, Frida, and to Paint Party Friday, hosted, as always by Kristin and Eva.

The canvas is a WIP, which I painted  a long time ago. I started repainting it a few months back, and then lost sight of it.  And yes - I found it under all the mess on my table, too. It is a 9x12" box canvas, inspired by arches and shop signs that I photographed many years ago in Acco. Since taking the photos I have toned down the yellow, making it more creamy in colour, and still think I need to do some work on it, but I don't yet know what. We shall see!

This morning when I got up there was a blanket of mist over the fields, and as the sun rose, it slowly started to thin out the mist, and it looked beautiful.

Have a great day you all, take care,

and thanks a lot for coming by!