Have I finished?

I’m working my way through a Digital Art Journaling class.  Or rather, I’ve just made a start and am trying to catch up with the flurry of prompts and video links, because as usual, there are so many things I want to do.

Oh yes, and I want to do them all. Now.  Of course.

But I’ve struggled with this journal page on the theme of “heart”.  I’m ok with the Photoshop techniques and enjoyed fiddling about with transparencies and so on.  I can’t tell you how exciting it was to get the font made of my handwriting, too!  My problem is that the workshop was based on a finished page and I just couldn’t bear to do anything vaguely like the teachers example.  So, although I tried to start off with a faded old map as a background, I couldn’t get it to work with what I wanted to do.  Not only that, but there were other elements in the layout as well, but I decided that they added nothing to the finished composition, so I took them out.

What did I learn in this class – apart from how difficult it is to call something “done”?

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  • I installed & used paint/mixed-media brushes in Photoshop – though I could do that already
  • Rotated & resized type – I had done this too
  • Created a clipping mask with a shape & outline – that was useful!
  • Used type as a clipping mask – I did that but erased it
  • Added a splat brush – Oh, there’s plenty of splatting!
  • Created a stroked border – I liked that so much I did it twice!

I also learned something I’ve always known, that it is worth stepping away from the canvas and coming back to it – or in the digital world, to save the file and open it in a different situation, ie put a photo an your blog!  The page in this post looks so much better than it did when I had my nose up against the Photoshop screen and I really think that yes, I can say with confidence that I’m done with Lesson One.

Lesson Two presents further challenges.  The theme is “home” and not only do I not want to follow the well trodden path set by the teacher’s example, I don’t do whimsy or spiritual.  Hmmm…watch this space!

Two of my friends are also working on the class – Take a look at Helen’s journal pages, and Dorothy’s too.

Let the fun begin

I’m still obsessing over the size of my journal, the numbering for the pages, the style and colour…I really do need to simply getonwithit.

Today I have two Christmas dinners to enjoy.  This lunchtime, I enjoyed a rather less than traditional lunch at Jamies in Cheltenham in the company of some old friends and colleagues.  This evening will be more of a turkey and all the trimmings affair with my WI friends from Avening.

The Mince Pies at Jamies this lunchtime were divine!  Here’s the recipe for what looks like the same thing, but those we tasted were heavy on the black pepper we think, which added a truly delicious twist to the old favourite.  I must give it a try.

Whilst I was out enjoying myself, my Hero was having fun at the dentist.  Life is just not fair, is it?

Still learning

My journal is coming along nicely and building into quite a collection now, but after a weekend away, I’d got a little behind with my pages.

A couple of hours were needed to sit and sort through the ephemera collected on the way and to print out a few labels and journal cards.

Thankfully, that gave me the prompt for what I learned yesterday!

And today?  Well, today I learned a new word, thanks to the crossword and my hero, who tells me that his own hero, the composer Joachim Raff, includes “Dans la Nacelle” in his repertoire of piano music.   Now, before you think that Raff was finding poetry and music in the aerodynamics of aircraft engine housings, be reassured that the French word nacelle can also refer to a small boat, but I find that use is now described as obsolete.

I shall just have to engineer a conversation about aerodynamics to drop it into then, won’t I?

Today I learned

all sorts of things.  Keeping my notebook close to hand and jotting down this and that throughout the day is a great exercise and though I’ve usually got a small book to hand with a pencil tucked inside, Shimelle’s class prompts me to pay a little more attention and take a few more notes.

For example, a conversation with a WI friend this morning gave me cause to investigate the Order of St Lazarus and St John and the Queenhithe Ward Club.  I was writing a report for our monthly newsletter about the lovely people we’ve entertained to lunch during the past month and of course, instantly learned a great deal from five minutes googling.

Would I feature this on my daily page?  Possibly.

But a little later on, I was in the kitchen listening to Radio 3 and heard Sarah Walker play Rameau’s La Poule.  She introduced it by stating it was her favourite piece of music featuring chickens.

Huh?

My hero and I mulled over this and considered alternatives, if indeed there were any?  The first one he came up with was the Funky Chicken or the Birdie Song and reacting quickly before this could be taken any further (please, use your imagination!) I was humming the tune I associated with chickens.

“You know, da da da-da da, da da da-da da, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo..” (as so on).

Well, I was up to my elbows in flour and sugar at the time, baking a birthday cake for a colleague to take to my meeting yesterday afternoon.

My hero sighed and realised I wasn’t going to leave it there.  He got out his iphone and looked for “chicken” on Spotify.  There appeared a long list of weird and totally offbeat answers, none of which bore any resemblance to the music I was thinking of.

“It’s by Debussy or Mussorgsky,” I said.  “Might be Pictures at an Exhibition.  you know…da da da-da da, da da da-da da, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo..”

One click and it was playing.  Baba Yaga’s Hut on Chicken Legs.

So, my page for today’s LSNED class features the story presented in the same format as I’m working in for this book.  The page is an envelope made from a magazine page (I think this was a photo of a staircase in a grand house), the brief journalling is printed onto a shipping label (happily acccepted by my HP printer if I whisper “epson” very quietly in its ear as I press the “print” button) and the full story on a card inside the envelope, together with any other ephemera from the day.  The picture is from a favourite film, Howls Moving Castle, which was loosely based on the Baba Yaga story.

What on earth will I learn today?!

Sunday afternoon

I spotted a link to this nifty way of adding a spiral binding on another blog last week and it left me thinking that it was a neater, more together take on the ordinary spiral bind.  I thought I’d give it a go.

I’ve had this huge pad of 12 x 12 double sided paper for ages, having bought it very cheaply in Michaels or somewhere last year.  I very seldom use such large sized paper and though I know it’s silly not to dive in and use it, each time I’ve made a book recently, I’ve pulled it out and put it back unused.  That’s partly because it is rather bright and would dominate whatever else was going on

but also, cutting into a large piece of posh paper takes courage!  I resolved that one yesterday but making the pages of my usual, small format book a quarter of the page – no waste = happy girl.

I actually made two books at the same time – they have soft card rather than stiff board covers and have the same bright pages inside, a mixture of pattern and plain.

They each measure 6 x 6 inches (because it was 12 x 12 paper, I put away my usual metric rulers and got out my quilting tools) and have the spiral binding in the centre of the spine, done using my Bind-it-all and following the tutorial in the first link of this post to the letter.  It worked well.

Except…(isn’t there always an except?) I neglected to take into account the size of the binding ring when measuring the card for the covers and as a result, the pages showed beyond the cover edge.

I quickly trimmed off about a quarter of an inch and resolved that one easily.

But of course, my worktable looked like a game of pick-up-sticks afterwards!  So, this afternoon I’ve been playing about with them, because we can’t be wasting paper, can we?

I’ve woven some into a loose pattern which will look great on the cover of one book, and am now contemplating what to do with the rest.

This?   This?  or possibly something different.  We’ll see!