What's in my art journal? Dodged a Bullet

This page is a reminder for me to PAY ATTENTION to my life, my actions, my reactions and to be accountable for every step I take in life. I am so completely grateful for this particular life lesson.

Working in my 9 x 6 handmade journal, I came back to a page that already had a background on it.  The background has stitching, markings, scribbles, ink sprays, and overall has a wonderful  artmosphere about it  (I just made that word up, feel free to use it).

My new stencil mask, Karla, was use as a cut out.  The bullet was drawn and colored on tissue paper so I could place it on top of the cut out.

I usually keep this journal open to display my current favorite page, this lil reminder will be displayed for a while!

Thanks for stopping by.  Until the next blog...pay attention, you may dodge a bullet too!

What's in my art journal? Old problem, New Stencil

Stencil & Mask

I've got a nice little stack of handcut stencils that's continuing to grow.  Ever since I bought the Cricut Explore Air, I've been trying to cut these puppies on it, its definitely been an art tantrum kinda thing.

 Let me back track and say I've fallen in and out of love with this Cricut Explore and I miss my Cricut Expression (WE had and understanding!).  I've had tons of technical issues with this Explore and cutting stencils were a hit and miss thing, mostly miss.  Now with the new design space, I'm in love again.  However, I'm still having a problem with scanning my images for cutting.  No matter how much I clean my scanning surface, there's always these invisible specks that get pick up on the image that the software wants to cut out.  It's so frustrating.  Please if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear it.

Any who, I was able to cut several stencils last night, specks and all, and this one is going to be a lot of fun.  All that to say this, here's what I've done with it so far.  Warning, you'll probably see this stencil a lot!

This is using the mask

This is using the stencil

And this is Tiger (AKA Kitty), my grandcat,  he spell checked this blog for me....thank you Tiger.

And thank YOU for stopping by, every visit is appreciated.  Until the next blog...enjoy!

What's in my art journal?

Hello,

Recently I was gifted some wonderful stencil masks.  A mask is the cut out from a stencil (like a reverse stencil). Two of my favorite from the bunch is this fence and this sprig of flowers or leaves.  The latter reminds me of a tree and that's how I used it. 

 

Both journal pages already had a background started.  On this  page, I put the mask down and sprayed "smoke" distress stain over it.  

With the distress stain that was left on top, the masks were then flipped over onto this page.  Sometimes within the ink blots I can see an image trying to emerge.  Within one of the ink blots I seen this Berenstain bear"ish" figure, so I traced over it with a marker and added some details.  Afterwards , at first, I was sorry I did it because the bear doesn't really go with the page, or at least not the "idea" of the page I had in mind.  But the bear is cute, and I believe we owned half of the poplars books at one time, so I'm going to have to work on this being a Berenstain Bear theme.  I think I see a castle in the background or a villain.  Oh yeah, there's a story in there some where.   Reminds me of when the kids were young, this was fun.

Thanks for your visit, until the next blog...enjoy!