Obviously, I have forgotten to write a blog post last week 😦

I remembered on Sunday, and I thought I would do it then. So it’s Wednesday and I obviously took my time again, so I may as well do the two together 🙂

My last week was extremely busy and emotional, and no wonder I forgot about blogging. I had two visits to the dentist and no visit to Art Store…. And then I met a friend whom I haven’t seen in eight years and that triggered lots of not so nice memories and loads of emotions I needed to work through. But I am happy to report that all is fine and, with a little help of my art making I feel wonderful again.

So, let me give you photos from last two weeks. The first is this one which I did in my small journal. I used some oil based printing paint (white you see on the borders). I was very excited about that because I wanted so much to use white color for stamping and wanted it to be real paint and not ink pad. It kind of works, but it takes ages to dry (3-4 days) which is not acceptable amount of time if you are stamping into your art journal… Seriously…

Then I did some stamp carving. I am very excited about the result:

This was done on the front cover of my new big journal with beautiful Fabriano hot pressed watercolour paper. Yum! I started colouring it, then it did not really work, so I keep playing and layering and this is how it ended:

After lots of layers, I stamped again on top, but this time with the white acrylic paint mixed with some retardant medium. It serves to slow down the drying of acrylic paint, so that you can keep stamping repeatedly for some  15-20 minutes. Just what I needed. Good bye oil paint! Perfect!

The next thing I did was a rather quick painting of Minerva (goddess of wisdom) for Life Book 2015 class. I felt really inspired to do it, so it was happy easy and quick painting:

After that, I did two pieces for Art Journal Summer School:

This one with collage birds, which was not really exciting, you can see… I simply do not like doing birds…

And this one which was really cute and I love it and I will probably do more. It’s quickly done, but somehow looks really funny. I decided to add a little story, somehow felt that it must be their story 🙂

And then, as I said, I met that friend of mine and was filled with emotions to bursting so the following two pages were therapeutic and are extremely precious to me:

Yes, there is a spelling mistake. Like many other people, I suddenly lose the skill of spelling correctly when writing slowly… 🙂

This one is my most loved page in my journal until now…

Again, I am amazed at how art making helps with de-stressing and putting things in perspective. I have no idea what happens in the process, but it works. Just listening to your intuition and letting go, without aim and without a precise idea of what you want to create. It’s meditative and it’s healing and it’s so rewarding… Long live art journaling! 🙂