Its a nice bright start to the day here in our part of the East of England, The sun is shining although its cold out there, the kids have gone back to school, and today is the day that our 3rd lock down in the UK is easing and a good number of our shops, pubs and clubs are reopening and can see customers again. Today is a good day. I shall spend it by staying home and taking a couple of walks around the village, as well as a quick shop to Tesco and the Pharmacy. I have missed shoppig, just getting in the car and driving to the city and going to shops, but after a year of not doing it, I am, I have to say a tad nervous / worried / out of my comfort zone. I miss charity shop hauls though so I think that and my local craft store will be my first shop experience.
I’ve had an Idea how I can show my “Blogs I follow” list. Its only taken me a couple of hours to do it, but its there at the bottom of the page – let me know what you think! And now I have the list its going to be easy to manage going forward. Equally – wow how many amazing blogs I would not have found if it wasn’t for Effy’s blog along. Please do take a look if you want some interesting and diverse reading fodder.
Here is my Challenge art work for today. As mentioned yesterday I did do it a day early so its been an easy add today 🙂 This is my Mindful Giraffe Notebook and Alcohol Markers.
April 12th Mindful Giraffe and Alcohol Markers
Here is my Lettering challenge picture, everyone loves a bit of Marilyn Monroe!
April 12th letters
And now its 3 pm, and the kids are on the way home from school, so best I get my skates on and organise there afternoon drink and snacks and start the evening duties!
Blog-Along with Effy
Disclaimer:
All opinions expressed here are my own. I paid for any products discussed. I received no payment and I am not affiliated in any way with any brand mentioned herein.
Today started off well but quickly descended into a “why isn’t that working” as the auto generated emails from the website have stopped including the pictures! After an hour of messing about we decided we had had enough and would leave it for today.
So onward with the day, and I design today’s challenge page, feeling really pleased with myself I was about to take my photo for uploading to Instagram when I realised I had done the wrong day on the page. Darn I shall have to do another one, and I’ve messed up my order of books. Oh well onward and upwards, do a new drawing and upload. The page doodles are inspired by Johanna Basford, I really enjoy her colouring books and I have the her “How to draw” book.
April 11th Scribble & Dot and Alcohol Markers
As its Sunday, and the day before kids go back to school, we decide to have some family time and watch a movie, queue time to introduce the kids to a classic – The Truman Show – they actually enjoyed it, I had forgotten how good it is.
After this, I get to play in the Craft room, for some reason I decided to sew a new pencil roll. I’m about 75% way through. It would have been finished except whilst cooking tea I installed the Canva app on my phone (I’d heard a lot about it on various arting forums) and started playing with making a logo, which led on to playing in Affinity Publisher and actually designing something we like. You may have noticed the new logo at the top of the page? Well I spent around an hour making the logo and my poor IT manager Husband spent a good sight longer getting it to work on the page in a way we liked. He is SO clever!
New mail received this week:
The first is a new subscription box of goodies. I ordered a back box of journal Ephemera from LollipopClubBox there is SO much stuff in here, its good quality papers, stickers and bits and pieces. There is even a Zine to give ideas of how to use it! Really good value.
LollipopClubBox
The next is from Ohh Deer. I ordered a mystery box, and it contains a lot of really good fun things. I really don’t need to order another one any time soon! Again so much stuff to play with, and to potentially offload to the children…
Ohh Deer Haul
All this means I am writing this page at 9 pm again! I do still need to read everyone’s (I mean 3) blogs, hopefully I will get to do this soon.
See you tomorrow!
Blog-Along with Effy
Disclaimer:
All opinions expressed here are my own. I paid for any products discussed. I received no payment and I am not affiliated in any way with any brand mentioned herein.
Day 10, and I am so happy to say that without really trying I have actually completed a 100 day project. I didn’t follow a particular theme or thread, just “I will do something every day for 100 days, and hopefully will post it to Instagram” so what did I do?
#journallingjanuary was hosted by Under The Rowan Trees and was to encourage us to write in a journal daily. I am not a journaller and this was tough so I kept it small and brief, but I achieved 31 days of writing something!
#lettersinmystyle was hosted by @ACornishGeekLetters on Instagram, for this we wrote phrases, in our own lettering style, Emma gave us the daily prompt and the community produced their own pages. I really enjoyed getting to grips with faux calligraphy again, and enjoyed the 28 days.
#artisticspringtime was hosted by me, @donnas_Creative_space on Instagram. I created a challenge to write an artist and song title, each one was (fairly) linked to spring time. Each day was done in faux calligraphy again and I wrote it in my homemade journal. I posted the challenge onto Instagram, posted my pictures daily and generated a hashtag, however it was only picked up by one person. That person doodled something each day and produced a great sheet at the end, 31 days completed.
#30dayjournaltest – I have created another challenge for myself, I have decided to actually break the page of 3 journals I have bought but didn’t want to use (They are super pretty and really didn’t want to be anything more than shelf decoration so it’s tough!). My challenge is to complete one page a day, in one journal, and use the same medium across 3 days for the month of April. 30 days, 10 medium, 3 journals. This will then let me have good material to do a full and proper product review on these journals. They are 3 different company journals at 3 different prices. It will be interesting to see what happens – its been interesting so far! (10 days completed so far).
Today’s Journal test is with the Archer & Olive A5 notebook and Spectrum Noir alcohol markers. I was actually pleasantly surprised by this, Yes I know I’ve just doodled but the page hasn’t failed at all. I remembered to leave a blank page either side to allow for bleed through, and it did, I also remembered to put spare paper underneath to catch the extra bleed. At 9 pm at night I think that’s pretty impressive of me.
April 10th Archer & Olive and Spectrum Noir
#blogalongwitheffy where I am blogging daily uploading my page to a Effys facebook group, and commenting on at least 3 other peoples blogs. There are SO many fantastic blogs I am being introduced too! I am definitely reading abd commenting on most pages posted, I have signed up to so many to follow on so many platforms! (Same 10 days so far)
#lettersinmystyle April challenge, another challenge set by Emma at @acornishgeekletters varying things for the month I plan to dip in and out of, faux calligraphy with themes, this week is BAFTA film quotes. (I may actually have done all 10 pieces so far!)
In addition to the above, I have also made other art in many other varying forms. Check my Instagram feed for a show and tell, it probably doesn’t show it all, but its a good roundup! I am a member of Wanderlust2021, Lifebook2021, I have Lifebook2020 and BookofDays2020 to complete, I am Journal Making from Willa, as well as the ArtBundle purchased for me in January, I have an ongoing subscription to Awesome Art School and The watercolour Academy, I also purchase varying subscription boxes from Kia Creates, ScrawlrBox and Under The Rowan Trees as well as also purchasing the odd new one from other locations!
We have also finished watching Firefly and SnowPiercer this month, so need recommendations of more to watch. Something that is OK for the kids would be good!!
I am SO lucky that I have such a supportive and encouraging husband. We have been 24/7 together for the last year due to the pandemic, and whilst the children were homeschooling I struggled with my day-to-day a lot, and my amazing husband recognised that I needed time to craft. He allowed me the time, space and facility to just BE ME. He isn’t surprised I have completed 100 days, I have in truth been doing art daily for quite a bit longer, but we all recognise that I need this. And you know what – I’m actually getting better at it, I’m feeling more confident in my ability, even if I don’t yet feel “creative”.
I thank the art community for inspiring me daily, but I thank my husband from the bottom of my very soul for being My Man and for allowing me to be His Woman.
Whoop Whoop onto the next 100 days!
Blog-Along with Effy
Disclaimer:
All opinions expressed here are my own. I paid for any products discussed. I received no payment and I am not affiliated in any way with any brand mentioned herein.
A Screech Owl is 8 inches tall and has a wingspan of 18 – 24 inches. The Screech Owl mainly eats earthworms, insects, crayfish, tadpoles, frogs, and lizards. They will also eat mice, rats, squirrels, moles and rabbits. Screech Owls live in forestry areas, so if you live near a large group of trees, then the owl that you will most likely hear is the Screech Owl. The Screech Owl live for 14 years in the wild. Just a random fact that I know about Screech owls, is that when they fly, they beat their wings 5 times a second.
Day 9, First off, I have to say that today’s announcement by the Palace was very sad. Prince Philip has always been one of my favourite Royals. He was just kind of a nice guy, despite his status in life he seemed a decent, down to earth guy as far as I am concerned. We have obviously been aware for quite some time this day would come, but its still sad. RIP Prince Philip.
Now on to my art – I have completed 3 art pages today.
The first piece was for an art challenge on a blog I looked at because of reading blogs in this blog-along. Thank you Angela and Susan for introducing me to the challenge. I really enjoyed my journal page and I definitely want to do more.
Never More Design April challenge
Next I went on to do my daily challenge of my journal test. This time it is my Scribble & Dot A5 dot grid notebook and the Ecoline Watercolour Brush pens. Once again I have been pleasantly surprised by this book, the paper held up well to the watercolour pens. I layered them heavily, covered all of the paper and there was very little in the way of damage to the paper. In terms of image quality, the image falls down where I didn’t let the pen dry before layering with another colour and you get the classic watercolour feathering.
Journal Test Scribble & Dot with Ecoline pens
Lastly its the latest classroom piece for Wanderlust 2021. This week its the turn of Kate Crane as the tutor. The class theme is Silhouette and today we are going to be creating a spread using background paper made using gel prints or brayer printed colours of our choice, appropriate level of stencil and doodles to add layers and texture, then add a tree with detail, some journalling ( I didn’t do that bit) and then paper cut some windows. It’s quite funny that my journal page above was a sort of “stained glass” piece and the piece in Wanderlust is similar. I really enjoyed making this piece today, and now I have a lot of collage fodder to play and doodle with as I made several background pages whilst doing the class!
Wanderlust Dual Page spread
Blog-Along with Effy
Disclaimer:
All opinions expressed here are my own. I paid for any products discussed. I received no payment and I am not affiliated in any way with any brand mentioned herein.
