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

Otterly Fantastic planner pages

2018 will henceforth be known as the year that I became obsessed with otters. And it's entirely the fault of a good friend and colleague of mine who is also obsessed with the cute little hand-holding critters. We became so obsessed we did an information project on them with our students at school because it was something different to the traditional Australian animals we might normally have covered. So, when I saw the gorgeous painted otters in one of the Patreon packs that Anna has on her Patreon account, I was SO excited and had to use them in a layout. Because who doesn't love a bit of cuteness staring up at them from their planner pages? Full disclosure: while I am a member of Anna's design team, I subscribe to her Patreon account of my own accord, because I love her extra content and the digital designs that she releases. I adore cutting out cute pictures and creating layouts with them. If you'd like to watch the process of this layout, check out this video:

This was a pretty simple layout to create - all I needed were some washi tapes and the printable from Anna's Patreon account, from which I just fussy cut out the images. I wasn't too worried about the whitespace (it's my planner, it's for me, and I don't get hung up on too much perfection... otherwise I would be a lot more stressed out on a daily basis!). All the washi tapes are ones I have collected from various places including Etsy and instore here in Australia and I picked them because the purple-y tones matched the purple on the teacup. Look, otters in a teacup! My layout is a monthly layout on two pages that's my own design and works for me, with larger boxes for Saturday and Sunday because those are usually my busiest days in my personal planner (my work planner is usually weekday heavy, naturally) and I wanted something relatively crisp and clean and easy to work with. A few strips of washi, a bit of glue for the cut-outs and some hand lettering to add a tiny bit more interest and I was done!

 

How do you like to plan? Do you like stickers? Cut-outs? Minimalist? A combination of any of the above, or something completely different? I love switching it up on a regular basis. I find it keeps life interesting and makes my weeks a lot of fun. If you like this video, you can find plenty of other planner layouts (over three years' worth now!) on my Youtube channel. 

 Have a wonderful week, planner friends! 

 Stef

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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Art Journaling FB Group 

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.

Travel Journal and Memory Keeping

I adore keeping a travel journal, what a perfect way to document your holiday and to save memories. My latest journal took advantage of the July and August patreon resources and printables from Anna Brim's patreon goodies. I also sourced ideas from Anna's Adventure Journaling course. It's always a sad occasion coming back from your holiday's and I really loved my latest one in Palmanova, but I also love finishing off my journal and seeing it come together.

I always start my travel journal with a details page of where and when I'm going and staying. I also always set it up before I go. I add printables, ink, stickers and leave a space to write and add in photos. I don't have a portable printer so I always print my photos when I return and then stick them in after it is all filled in. I prepare my page before I go away using Anna's patreon printables, project life cards and a variety of stickers and washi tape. I find the whole process of setting it up before I go away so relaxing and it helps to get me in the holiday mood (not that I need it!). Read about how I set up my journals here - How to Create a Travel Journal 

Completing the journal on holiday

I love the mix of printables this month, some are photos that Anna took and added text to and others are her drawings and journaling cards that she has a space to write on. This month Anna has also included lots of quotes and text too, perfect for my journaling style.

I always fill as much in as possible whilst on holiday, it's a lovely way to relax by the pool (hey, who needs an excuse!). I love Anna's hot air balloon printable and the mix of her own photos merging with mine, which this time I had printed through the post.

I also love adding pockets made with cute envelopes, they are perfect for adding larger photographs and Anna's gorgeous journaling card (which I think came from a Brimbles Box last year). Then of course there's Anna's cute pineapple stickers! Tip in's are also a great way to make the most of your pages and are a great way to add in leaflets and tickets.

I honestly have used so many of Anna's collage sheets this month that I do apologise for the amount of photos in this post... but how cute are they? I love the beach girl and the ice cream, again there is space to write inside the scoop. There are also a variety of papers to print. I am in love with the fruity one in the last picture. 

I hope this has inspired you to get started on a travel or an Adventure Journal and don't forget you can get ALL of these goodies every month when you join Anna's patreon, it really is great value (I used printables from just some of the range from the last 2 months). Now the holiday come down really starts, especially as it's back to school where I teach in less than 2 weeks... ssshhh.

You can find me here on my blog and social media

kerrymaymakes.com

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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.

Watercolour Flowers

Recently Anna posted one of her gorgeous pieces of art on Instagram, and I was hopeful it would be one of the Patreon collage sheets for this month.

It was! But even better than that, it was the feature of one of the Patreon videos with a tutorial on how to create a similar page. As a result, I was able to create these pages using the same techniques:

I hope you like them and you get involved by checking out Anna's Patreon which includes all of Anna's beautiful collage sheets including these gorgeous pages as well as art tutorials such as this one.  Anna has recently changed her tiers on Patreon to provide even greater value for money, so if you're not a Patreon, now is a great time to join us. 

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