December journaling

Hey everyone, I hope you're starting to feel festive, I definitely am.  Jingle and Mingle helped, but my daughter constantly singing carols from her Christmas play has got me ready for the festive season.

I've been trying to keep my December memory keeping simple.  December is busy in my house as I'm sure it is in yours, so I didn't want to set myself up for failure by creating unrealistic expectations of myself.  I've been making a list each day (see #30lists on instagram) and decorating them with my Christmas ephemera.  Anna has some gorgeous collage sheets this month and they were perfect for this project.  There's a page of festive words, which I just love and I used on this page to list the things I wanted to take photos of this month.

There's also this lovely father Christmas paper (I've torn and glued it to the top of page 6) and some little journalling cards which have been perfect to write my lists on (here on page 5).

I hope you're finding time to create this month, it's important to do something for yourself in this season of giving.

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

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.