Watercolour and Brusho Snowdrops Art

It's been a long time since 1, that I have created any watercolour art and 2, that I have done a post for Anna Brim, but yay, I can say that I am happy to be back doing both. I was so inspired by Anna's watercolour snowdrops video tutorial over on her patreon page - http://www.patreon.com/mrsbrimbles, that I decided to add my own twist to it using brusho as well as watercolour and stamping ink. I still used drawing gum to create a resist for the snowdrops.

You can see my full process in the video below.



The Art Process 

I started out by using drawing gum for the snowdrops them-self then added a mix of green and yellow watercolour using my Daniel Smith watercolours and my JD.

Next I added a variety of different brusho drops and added lots of water for it to take effect. It was a little too vibrant, so out came the trusty kitchen roll to lift some of the colour off the page. I love watching brusho take shape, I could literally sit and watch it all day.

I then went to work on adding texture using blotted kitchen roll, and ink pad and going over with darker and lighter shading for the flowers and stems. This really added depth to the image. When it was dry it was time to peel off the drawing gum and add final touches to the shading.

I love the completed look of the art journal page. I actually might frame it for my craft room wall. I think it has a real ethereal whimsical type nature to it and I'm so pleased with how my sense of depth and texture has improved. Don't forget to check out Anna's patreon page
http://www.patreon.com/mrsbrimbles.

See you all on the blog and in the Mrs Brimbles Happy Place group soon.
Kerry xx

You can find me here: Blog: kerrymaymakes.com Instagram | You Tube | Pinterest Art Journaling FB Group

Sketchy Girls and Journal pages

Well, it certainly has been a while since I last posted. I have been following and loving all the bits you guys have been sharing over in the Brimbles Facebook Group  but I've been a bit AWOL. I got married at the beginning of October (yay!) so most of August and September saw me working away on candles, decorations and my bouquet as I decided to undertake most things myself. Phew! It was stressful and hardworking but boy did it teach me a thing or two!

(Photo curtesy of Anna Brim. I was too busy doing the getting married bit and I've not had the professional photographs back yet.)

For a while I've been struggling with creativity and I've continuously hit a block whenever the creative mojo strikes. I've had to learn to love and enjoy the process of crafting again, sometimes working creatively for you business can, sadly, sometimes starve and taint the artist within. The process becomes clinical, and unfortunately I have lost some love for it. Since the wedding though, I feel rejuvenated and I've decided to dedicate some more time for creating just for me. I've taken a couple of weeks off, closing my shop to create purely for me and to push and explore some ideas I'd placed on the back burner.

Autumn is probably my favourite season, with Winter coming an incredibly close second (mostly because of CHRISTMAS!). It's all the magical colours, the slight chill in the air, the feel of forthcoming rain, the squash and crunch of leaves underfoot. It is like the world opens up, and comes alive, shedding itself of what has come before and preparing itself for the new beginning in Spring. I feel like my soul vibrates to a different tune during the autumn, like I can breathe again. I can feel the inspiration bubbling away under the surface.

Following Anna's Autumn Doodle from last month's Patreon collage sheets, which pictured all her favourite things about the season, I decided to fetch my stamps and felt tips and give it a whirl. It feels like it's been a very long time since I did any of this!

Using stamps felt like a good way to go, it meant I could get creating a page, building volume and content quickly. All without the fear of how it would look, once it's down, it's down, no faffing back and forth about placement.

I have quite a collection of stamps, but there were a few Autumnal activities which I didn't have an appropriate stamp for, so I doodled a few in there too!

I ended up doing a bit of ghost stamping, which came about by mistake, since I dropped my inked stamp block onto the page and a little transferred. I thought I would roll with it and turn it into a feature. You'll notice it is a little funky around the tea bag haha! I've now filled

After getting stuck in with the stamping and colouring in, the creativity just kept on coming. This little lady came to mind after looking in the mirror. I often wear my dreads in a bun on the top of my head when I'm creating as they have a tendency to fall into paint, glue, glitter, whatever it is and the result is always a mess! J made the joke once that my dread bun looks like a cross between a pineapple and a pumpkin, and he's right.

Cartoony style art is something I'm really getting into, I'm not very good, I still really struggle with the looseness of it, but I'm getting there! I used a mixture of watercolour paint and pencils to create the texture of her hair and then outlined her using a 0.3 waterfast pigment liner. I felt she was missing something so I gave her some pumpkin leaf earrings too match her hair. I want to work a little more on faces so I'm going revisit some of Anna's early Patreon content where she gave some tips and tricks for drawing sketchy girls.

I'm now off to download and play with the next lot of collage sheets! Till next time guys xx

Watercolour Moon Art Journal Page

Hi everyone, wow it's nearly Christmas, time flies! Today I have been playing around with a few things from Anna Brims Patreon goodies to create a Wintery themed art journal page. I'm in love with this page, the colour, the texture, the mood, it all sings to me and makes me warm and fuzzy.

For the page I followed a video tutorial of Anna creating a moon page like this one, but with a painted unicorn... you can get this as a collage sheet and I tell you now, it's stunning (you can see a sneak of it below in the photograph). 

 

 

Creating the watercolour moon page

I used my Daniel Smith watercolours firstly to paint the moon and background. I'm not going to go in to the how's here - you can see for yourself on Anna Brims Patreon Page. Anna then suggested using nail varnish to add sparkly texture and oh my word I love it, it really makes the moon and sky stand out. I then added a Prima Spray mist to really give the sky texture. I did have to be careful here as the spray mist does have a mind of it's own and I always feel it sprays a bit too much. However the result here was just what I was going for.

I then added one of Anna's cute Autumnal girls which I cut from a collage sheet to really make the page pop. She's so cute. I must say the collage sheets this month are amazing. I can't wait to use the rest of them now that I finally have some printer ink. Lastly I finished off the page with a quick quote using a white paint pen and outlined it all and added shadow using a fine uni ball pen.

I'm really liking the page and I will definitely be using up my old and unused nail varnishes in my art projects again. I must warn you though it did pong quite a bit whilst I was creating the page.

Thanks for reading the post, I promise I won't leave it as long next time. Now my ink here is here there will be no stopping me with the collage sheets.

​Take Care, Kerry xx

You can find me here:
kerrymaymakes.com

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Painting pumpkins using Anna's tutorial

Hi everyone, it's Rose here.  The change in the weather has definitely been more noticeable

in the past week or so and it's made me want to snuggle in with paints and my journal!  Oh and YouTube and art videos.  We celebrated Halloween more this year than we had before, my little girl is now 5 and she really wanted to hand out sweets for the Trick or Treaters so we made a pumpkin for the step and bought in a load of sweets.  Unfortunately it rained and only two groups of people knocked but she loved giving them their sweets.

The pumpkin carving leaves you with loads of pumpkin flesh so I needed to find something to do with it and used the BBC website to find a recipe for soup.  It ended up being really nice with some fresh bread and we all enjoyed it.  So I happened upon the video Anna made in which she painted, and taught us, how to paint pumpkins.  Anna said in the video that she was thinking of including her recipe in her art journal and I thought that was a great idea for me to be able to make a record of the night and something I could put on social media as well (I have lots of photos of my little one in her costume but she is adopted so I really don't like to share much online).

You can probably see that my style of drawing and painting is very different to Anna's, I wish I could be whimsical and fun but I used Anna's advice on painting in layers for the lights and darks and I actually really love my painting.

Don't forget to check out Anna's Patreon which includes all of Anna's beautiful collage sheets as well as art tutorials such as this one. You can find more of my art here, on my blog, or on Instagram.

Watercolour Tip in Doodle Journal Cards

Hi all, wow I have been feeling so inspired from Anna Brim's latest patreon videos. This month has great content in both the videos and collage sheets that I had so many ideas for this blog post. I decided to take inspiration from a video she shared with her patrons about using post it notes and doodles. I decided to add my own spin to it and use a painted watercolour background, then added doodles to that before cutting the whole page up to make a mixture of ATC Cards, Journal cards and post cards. You can see the whole process below.

ANNA - EMBED VIDEO HERE

I love how they turned out. I was very dubious as I was doing the doodles and wasn't convinced that the final cards would look good. However I was pleasantly surprised by how they came out. I'm going to be using these for a tip in swap we have going on in Anna's patreon Facebook group, so I'm looking forward to sharing these with my swap partner.

Just a short post today as I have most of it covered in the video. I hope that you enjoyed the process. Do check out Anna Brim's patreon, it really is a fantastic resource. Take Care and I will see you soon.

You can find me here:

kerrymaymakes.com

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I love Autumn, it’s no secret. Using Anna’s artwork to create Autumnal spreads has been a therapy I’ve craved. My life is going through a huge transitional period and being able to sit and create has kept me sane! I usually work with watercolour but decided to get out the acrylics. I’ve been using them more and more recently, I find they give a much brighter and solid finish.




The first spread has an introduction to Autumn and the falling of leaves. In the UK the season is named ‘Autumn’ but as it’s well known, in the US it’s named ‘Fall’. I used to be quite biased and say Autumn was the best name for it however I am beginning to really warm to the word ‘Fall’, it literally makes me picture leaves falling. The past week has been quite blustery in the UK and we’ve finally got big piles of leaves everywhere! Also, how cute is Anna’s little Fox?

 

I then move onto Conkers! I don’t know what it is but there’s something very exciting about seeing conkers falling to the ground and collecting them. It immediately takes me back to my childhood and running to gather them, bonus points in I found one still in it’s spiky casing! A lot of the other kids would put them on string and have conker fights in the playground, if your opponent smashed your conker you lost. I have a feeling this has now been banned from playgrounds! I never used to play conkers, instead I would hoard my findings like treasure! Now I get to relive it, my Children are mini me’s!



From Conkers to Pumpkins. It wouldn’t be Autumn/Fall without Pumpkins. The majority of the page is taken up by a massive Pumpkin complete with decorative black Cat. I added to this a mouse from Anna’s 2017 Autumnal work. It’s only now as I look back at it that I realise I’ve placed a Cat and Mouse on the same page, a Cat hiding behind a Pumking ready to pounce! I’ve added a recipe journal card from Anna’s Patreon and found a Pumpkin Soup recipe. I may even attempt to cook it...eventually!

 

My last page is my chill out page. I seem to get a bit rubbish with reading during the Summer, I still do but it slows down. Autumn rolls round and out come the books! I love that the quote mentions “stacks of books (but read on my Kindle!)”. I must admit, as much as I love a real book in my hands, I do tend to read fiction on my Kindle. There’s only a handful of books I will read more than once (fiction that is) so it becomes clutter in my house. The Kindle is a running joke with a group of friends I have, they believe it is blasphemy. With the page itself I have chosen one of my favourite colours and used a pearlescent over the top. I’m not quite finished with the page at this point. I’m still working out how I want to finish it. That’s my most recent up to date artworks. I’m almost finished this sketchbook!

 Kelly xxx

 Where else you can find me: Instagram Youtube Shop

This month's blog post from me is inspired by our book club and the book we read for
September and October: Mr Penumbra's 24 hour book store.  I really liked this book, it was magical in the way only books about books can be.  I also really liked the theme of fellowship and friendship.

I really loved Anna's collage sheet that focused on her favourite quotes from the book and it got me thinking about my favourite.

I thought this one summed up the magic of the book for me:

"There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.  All the secrets in the world are hiding in plain sight."

I knew I wanted my page to represent the magic of the book and so I decided to paint a universe with watercolours, as we are led to believe the secrets to the universe are held in the bookstore and in the codes.  I then drew my representation of the symbol used by The Unbroken Spine (this is a great name for a book society!) and added the second part of the quote to it.

I really enjoyed stretching myself for this art journal page - I don't usually make art based on books I've read but I think I'm going to try and do it each month for the book club.

Don't forget to check out Anna's Patreon which includes all of Anna's beautiful collage sheets including these gorgeous pages as well as art tutorials. You can find more of my art here, on my blog, or on Instagram.

Creating art when there's no time

How do you make time for art when your time is limited?  It's one of the hardest parts of my creative life.  I have a full time job (which admittedly I do from home), a 4 year old daughter with additional needs, a husband and dog who both demand my attention and I'm studying for a second Masters qualification.

One of the ways I make time for myself is to keep my pages simple.  This month has been really hard, J has had a lot of appointments and a couple of operations and finding balance has been hard.  I got to the point today where I felt like it seriously couldn't get worse.  Anna created this beautiful painting of flowers and offered it in this month's Patreon collage sheets.  And so I questioned the universe but used this pretty, colourful painting to include some much needed optimism into the spread.

Don't forget to check out Anna's Patreon which includes all of Anna's beautiful collage sheets including these gorgeous pages as well as art tutorials. You can find more of my art here, on my blog, or on Instagram.

Using poetry to inspire art

I use poetry a lot in my art journal- it inspires a lot of my pages and gives additional meaning to my art.  I usually just store photos of poems I like on my phone but I've recently found this hard to keep track of.  So I've created a travelers notebook to collect these words that inspire me.  I write them poems or quotes in here and use a simple decoration on each page.  For these two poems I've used collage sheets from this month's Patreon and think they set the poems off nicely and look so pretty (making me more likely to continue with this notebook).

I've just started a new journal about the seasons and plan to include some of my favourite poems about change within it.  This is a found journal (basically anything that can be repurposed for art - in this case a children's book but it can be as simple as a mail order catalogue or a pamphlet you find at the doctor's office).

For my introductory page I wanted to journal about my journey as a woman, the seasons in our lives.  So I drew some figures based on some images from Jane Davenport's book and painted them.  I wanted a background that was airy and clean but it was impossible to watercolour on the glossy papers.  I sorted through some of my paper stash and thought this collage paper from last month's patreon was perfect - the exact style I needed in a format that I could add to the glossy pages.

As you can see I kept the original book page on the right and added my poem around the clouds.  I like the daytime-sunset contrast between the two pages and feel it helps further illustrate the idea of the seasons of our life.

 Don't forget to check out Anna's Patreon which includes all of Anna's beautiful collage sheets including these gorgeous pages as well as art tutorials.

You can find more of my art here, on my blog, or on Instagram.

Art journaling about me

I've been working on some art journal pages about me recently. I've been wanted to record some thoughts about motherhood and my journey to get there so that my little girl can read about it later when she's older. Her journey to us was a complicated one and so writing it down in a visual way helps to break that complexity down a little. As part of this journaling I wanted to write some lists - they're an easy way to record thoughts and record moments in time.

 As soon as I saw one of Anna's collage sheets from this month's patreon I knew it would be perfect for my list pages. I ripped them up (I find paper glues better if it's ripped rather than cut), swiped some acrylic paint on the page and journalled around them. Simple and effective. I also used the same paper as a piece of writing paper when I wrote to my penal, just printed it out and wrote my letter on the plain side. How would you use this collage sheet?

 

Don't forget to check out Anna's Patreon which includes all of Anna's beautiful collage sheets including these gorgeous pages as well as art tutorials. You can find more of my art here, on my blog, or on Instagram.

Watercolour Journal Spots and Journal Cards

This month as part of the Mrs Brimbles Creative Team I have been playing with watercolours and drawing gum again, but in a completely different way to last time. In Anna's latest Patreon tutorials, she has been showing us how to create something called 'Journal Spots', journaling cards that use drawing gum to create a resist area that we can then use to write or journal on. I love them!

I have created 4 different cards, each with a different purpose in mind. The one above is for my Happiness and Bloom Journals (both of which are junk journals). I have used the cards as prompts for further journaling. The one below is one of my long term goals: To move to Spain, it is something that I WILL be doing, even if takes until retirement to get there.

The Growth and Happy journaling cards are my Words of the Year, so something I have been holding dear and trying to live up to. Happy seems to be working for me at the minute. I have been much happier in my work and this has had a knock on effect in all areas of my life. I have used the card to document my weekend at Cambs Planner Con last week and you can see this in my journal below. It was such a lovely event and great to finally get to meet some of the lovely people I have spoken to online and to see friends that I have already met through the planner and journaling community. The page also uses stickers from Anna from both the ones that were sent with our ticket and ones from the latest Brimbles Box (Planner Nerds Bright's).

I've loved creating and using the Journal Spots and it is something I will be creating and making again. Do check out Anna's Patreon Page, she has updated it to include lots of new goodies and rewards including a tier where you can get the Brimbles Box included.

Take Care and I will see you soon,
​Kerry xx

Catch me on my blog - kerrymaymakes.com
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Raindrops & Rainbows

Hello!

 I’m a little late posting this but I’ve been working with Anna Brim’s Patreon artwork from April. I loved this selection of work because it’s so colourful! I decided to order the April Brimbles box and have included a few bits from there with my pages. In the first spread I’ve experimented with colour. Anna has taken raindrops and instead of having only blue, she has used a full spectrum of colours. I have created tip-ins on this page with journal cards as I love added decoration and layers. When I looked for writing to have on the page, I found a poem named ‘The Rainbow Witch’ by Amy Ludwig Vanderwater. It’s a short poem that doesn’t take itself seriously, a playful prose for the page.

 

The second spread in contrast to the bright rainbow page is much darker. I’ve used purples and greens on this page. Purple a very spiritual, powerful colour so it felt right for the page. I decided to work with a journal prompt on this page with a bit of self exploration. Using a the book ‘The Year of You’ by Hannah Braime, I chose the prompt, “What is one quality you embody today that you hope to keep for the rest of your life?”. I then did a bit of soul searching and answered this prompt across the page.
 

The third spread wasn’t actually planned and came by playing with the artwork. I knew I wanted to use these elements but wasn’t sure how. So in true style for me I arranged them on the pages and allowed my creative nature to run free. These pages had already had some blue paint spillages on the edge so I decided to work with it and I quite like how it’s turned out.

 

That’s all from me for now,
 Kelly xxx

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