A Day in the Life of My Journal

It started with this photo:


And this photo:


From there, I played around with a layout in my journal and came up with this idea:
From there, I used the smaller photo, traced the major lines, cut it into squares, rearranged and did a colourwash using Derwent Graphitint pencils. The pencils go on muted and dull, but with a water wash, the colours turn vibrant. The vibrancy of the colour depends on the amount of water used. These are a couple of results:


Do you see the face too?

Circles in the House

Yesterday I went with friends to French Beach. On the way, we stopped at Sooke Harbour House. While my friends gawked at the wonderful artwork, I took pictures. It is interesting how many circles you can find when you really look.

Sooke Harbour House
Originally uploaded by victanguera

French Beach was horribly windy and cold, but we had an enjoyable picnic lunch. We drove to Point No Point and walked the path to the beach. It is almost like heading through the forests of Middle Earth. I truely expected Bilbo to pop out at me (although meeting Strider would have made me happier.) I love this tree:

I'm going to play with this image for one of the exercises for the Studio Journal course.

Beyond Notan--Even Further

A while ago, I created this piece of Notan in fabric. This was even before the Studio Journal class where creating cutouts is part of lesson three.



Then I quilted it taking it beyond notan.


Then I made a kaleidoscope out of it, taking it even further:


Now to create notan shapes out of the kaleidoscope. Hum, wonder what you would call those. Maybe back to notan?

Kaleidoscopes and Stuff

I've been playing around with an online kaleidoscope creator. A word of warning, if you have an addictive personality, watch out. Much time will be wasted. But look at what you can create:


I'm trying the colour wash with plastic wrap on fabric, but no luck yet. Will keep playing with it and see what I can come up with. Results to follow.

My daughter (the one in art school) looked at my messy journal yesterday and commented: "Looks like an artist's workbook". Cool.

July TIF

This month Sharon asks: “What is it to be at the half way mark... “Half”, “Way” and “Mark” all lead off into interesting directions that can be represented in all sorts of ways. So that is the challenge for this month.”

An interesting question. Nothing comes to mind. I've just started Sharon's Studio Journal course, I've got the Exquisite Corpse challenge in progress (finally came up with an idea for the next one last night) and I'm hoping to do something for a black and white challenge. I'm almost 1/2 way through the editing in my novel. There is a half. And a way. No mark though.

Another thing that comes to mind is to leave certain projects half finished. I can then return to them when I have more time and quilt or whatever needs doing. Or maybe I can add marks to things that are presently half finished? I have the second shoe quilt I started, but have yet to quilt. That would be adding a mark to something that is presently half way done. Then I could half start another project and I've done it all!

If I work through exercises in the studio journal course and in the Art Quilt Workbook, but only get them to a certain stage, they would qualify. In lesson one, we were to translate an image into marks like we would stitch. This could also be an idea--to take a painting and make marks in my journal, but translate it into fibre when I'm less busy.

So many ideas. So little time!