Art journal flip through

I am half way through my current art journal and I have been sharing snippets on instagram and on the Journal Gypsies blog and some of you have asked to see more. Of course I am always happy to share my art journal (or the non private parts of it of course!) but it would be a while before it was completely finished so I thought I would do a half journal flip for you so you can see how this is coming along. I will do a full journal flip so you can see what it is like when it is fully completed.

Hope you enjoy...

My Acrylic Muse decided to pay a visit!

It is funny how your muse works, well mine is anyway. She comes and goes and dictates when and what she wants to do and sometimes there is just no stopping her. When she wants to do something she just does it without a care in the World. And when she is here, she is here to stay and all hell breaks loose and we just have to move over and let her get her own way.

So for quite some time now I have not been at all interested in my acrylics. Part of that is due to the mess and that I made a pact with myself that I would only use them in my room where it doesn't matter if I get paint everywhere, but then of late I have been journalling downstairs in the evenings whilst watching TV or if Mr B is reading or such like. My watercolours and a couple of pencils are much more transportable than a whole load of acrylics and pallettes. I know so lazy but then sometimes in the evenings I want easy, I don't want to have to think about all this stuff, I just want to sit there and create or journal about my day and not have to worry or think too hard about it.

Then at the weekend my acrylic muse decided to drop in and she stayed for quite a while, in fact she hasn't left yet, she has her feet well and truly up on the desk! So there I sat on a rainy Saturday afternoon in my room wandering what to do (Mr B had a cold and was watching TV on the sofa) so I reached for some acrylics and popped them on the desk. I opened my journal and I just started dropping and drizzling paint and so this happened...

I was quite startled myself as this is so out of character for me but you know what I thoroughly enjoyed it and I love the colours and well quite frankly I love how it is. Just how it is. I may just leave it like that but at the time I was like 'you silly bean now it is all wet you can't turn the page' so I ripped a page out and smooshed it down into the paint to take some of it off. It just didn't sit right so I took my pallette knife and started mixing it all around the page which looked really unsightly so I went old school. I call it old school because for me this is something that I used to do a lot but now no longer do, and that is I took some gesso and went over the page but just left a heart shape showing...

Again this really surprised me as I ended up loving the process, not so much the finished article but definitely the process and that is what struck the chord with me. So that then opened me up and it just went on and on. So I had a purple pallette, I tore another piece out of my journal and just got playing and that playing resulted in this coming out...

And I truly love him, I think he is a cutie pie. He is now actually available in my Etsy Shop as a day planner dashboard so it is funny how a little bit of play time to free your mind can result in a whole load of art!

There is more that I created and I shared my weather Goddess over on the Journal Gypsies Blog if you would like to check that out you can do that here.

Well I hope she is here to stay for a while longer as I am loving what we are creating together. Do you find that you have a muse who dictates what you should be doing? I would love to know!

Following my obsession! - Journal Gypsies

As you know I am now blogging on Journal Gypsies but I also want to share on my blog what I have posted over there too. So I am going to post that post on here too but only a little later that it appear over there. Confused? Yep me too!

I find that when I look through past journals, I have had obsessions, or influences if you will, that follow me pretty much throughout my journal. Sometimes they are a big influence or inspiration and they make it into other journals, sometimes it is a small stage of my life and they just stay in the one. Does that happen to anyone else?

I was looking back through my current journal and it suddenly became rather obvious to me that I was being heavily inspired by stars, the night sky and galaxies. Every other page has some sort of star symbol in it! I need to look into symbology and find out whether my inner self is trying to tell me something. After all I don’t always intentionally set out to create stars, many times I am idly drawing whilst watching the TV and then I look down and a star has emerged and I very much do paint and draw intuitively. Something for me to look into for sure. Why are all these stars popping up?

I have also moved from just stars to whole galaxies and have been totally obsessed with creating girls who have galaxies as their hair. I just love it. It is so therapeutic to create, just watching all the watercolours swirl into each other and at the end you are left with something really mysterious and magical. Well to me they are anyway.

I am a massive dreamer and believer in magick!

I am really enjoying my star gazing journey. I have no idea where it will take me next in this journal or if it will follow me int the next but for now I am enjoying traveling with the stars.