Playing with lines

LINEAL :Composed of or arranged in lines :Consisting of or being in a direct male or female line of ancestry :Descended in a direct line.

This little collage of papers, tea bag, flowers and another scrap of that tea dyed muslin I’d used before, was fairly easy and quick to put together. Dipping into my collage box, I chose the papers for their colour and arranged them pretty much vertically. I took this little photo to help me put them back in the same arrangement after I’d added glue and tape.

I added some stitching and staples to give some extra texture as well as holding things in place. I like to create my collage pieces separately like this then add them to the background in one piece.

Once added to the textured background, to stop the whole piece looking too random and bitty I trimmed it down to square off the edges making it much neater. As I’d cut off the word lineal I decided to add it back onto the collage by tucking it under the muslin.

The collage is filled with lines, from the texture paste in the background to the stitching lines and staples. All horizontal or vertical to create a harmonious whole. I love the shabby chic look but it has to be structured and tidy for me to accept it. A bit of a contradiction I know but it’s just the way I like to look at things.

The muslin and flowers come from this month’s box from Paper Pen and plan on Etsy.

Have a good weekend

Jaine xx

Serendipity in art

It doesn’t matter how much time I spend planning and creating a piece of work, my favourite pieces are the ones which have been created from the afterthoughts, the discarded rejects and happy accidents. This is why most of my art journals are made using clean up sheets and practice papers. A lot of the time a background which may look totally chaotic, looks completely different when die cut and used in some unfinished journal page. A flat journal page may need a spot of colour to complete it and a box of off cuts and rejects is a good place to look.

It was after a gel printing afternoon that the final prints to come off the plate were the clean up ghost prints. I always love these prints, they’re grungy, dirty and contain many different colours mixed together in an old peeling paint sort of way.

Next to me on the table was a box of off cuts which I use for collages and on the top was this piece of watercolour card, stained from having a teabag left to sit on it. You never know when these things will come in handy I say! Underneath all of that I also had dry tea bags which are great for collages too. The piece of muslin, stained from Tea Dye ink from Ranger was the only planned piece as I’d used it earlier in the day for a project with Paper Pen and Plan.

I die cut the tea stained card to use in a collage, tucking it under the tea bag and muslin. I didn’t waste the little shapes which came out of the die cut either and used those to continue the colour on the rest of the background. I used black paint to cover the die cut letters and whilst this was wet sprinkled some Black Magic powder from WOW! in patches. I swear to you the safety pin has been sitting on my table for weeks now waiting to be used and literally caught my eye as I needed something to catch the muslin down!

The craziest part about this whole process is that little star shining out from the centre of the collage. It wasn’t planned and I only noticed it when taking these photos. You couldn’t make it up!

I love mixed media.

Jaine x

Summer Vibes

I feel like I’m back in the swing of things again and the journaling vibes are flowing nicely. I decided to add another page in my Mixed Media journal and use a new product to me. In the recent package sent by Clare at Paper Pen and Plan, was a little jar of Texture Powder by Prima. I say ‘little’ it is in fact quite substantial and if I’m careful will last me a fair while. When added to another medium it creates a texture paste.

I started with a base of acrylic paint and texture added with the texture tools. It didn’t worry me that it was the backside of the page with stitching as I could just cover it with something else.

I mixed up the Texture powder with Unicorn Acrylic paint. It was just a matter of finding the right consistency myself, the Unicorn paint is already creamy so it didn’t take much powder to turn it into a useable paste.

It went through a stencil perfectly and I can also say that the colour wasn’t diluted at all by the powder.

Once it was dry I added a few scribbles and a few collage bits then had a flash of inspiration and went out to cut a couple of pieces of lavendar from the garden.

The texture is just great and again the pages of the journal stood up to it all with no trouble at all.

For Prima products and more go to Paper Pen and Plan on Etsy and get 10% off with the code JAINE10 too!

Jaine x

Tiny TN Insert

Every tuesday it’s #tinytntuesday on the Facebook page of Paper Pen and Plan, when we showcase our tiny pages and think small. This week I decided to think a bit bigger by creating not just a page but a whole insert. My old insert is pretty much busting out of the cover by now anyway, so as I had some time on my hands (like a lot of us do right now!) I thought I’d put together a new one.

Rather than create a new one with blank pages I decided it would be better to make one where each page has already been started to save time later. This is my mop up paper which I keep in a cheap A5 sketch book. I use it to clean brushes, stencils and anything else which might be messy.

It’s perfect for collages.

I cut a strip the same height as my tn from a section I liked, and stamped a couple of stamps over randomly.

I folded this up to create pages.

I glued each fold together,

forming my little booklet.

It was just a matter of covering it with some cute paper (Simple Vintage Garden District by Simple Stories) from Paper Pen and Plan and it’s ready to go.

The Paper Pen and Plan Facebook page is here and the Etsy shop to buy the Simple Stories papers is here

Stay safe

Jaine xx