Scrap Journaling

Painting Tape!

~ Patty Radish ~ 2 Comments

“Painting Tape”! Hmmm…sounds about as exciting as watching it dry. Well, I’m going to try to make it sound a little more interesting than that. I made some painted masking tape a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been having so much fun with it, I decided to make some more. And I thought I might as well snap some photos along the way to share in case you might be interested.

So, here we go…

Ingredients: wide masking tape, acrylic paint in your choice of color, gesso (or white paint), bubble wrap, and a plastic card or putty knife.

Here is the layering process.

I used my grandson’s finger painting tray for this, which was a great idea, this made it super easy clean up.

I went back over the tape with a darker shade of pink with my finger tip just to add a little more color. One of the nicest surprises was that you can see through the tape in spots.

Here is a finished page using some of the tape. I like to tear it off then slice it thin like washi tape…

…or use it as a background piece. The great thing about this is that you can make it in any color scheme you want. I just tape it to the plastic containers I use to keep my ephemera in and it’s always right there where I need it.

(You can see a little more about my art journaling organization here.)

So, there you go, my latest obsession.

I finally feel like I’m getting back into the swing of things with my art journals. I need to stop questioning why I like arranging small bits on paper and just get to it!

 

As always,

Thanks for the visit,

Have a great weekend,

~Patty

My Mini Art Journal

~ Patty Radish ~ 6 Comments

I haven’t been spending very much time on my art journals lately. Sometimes the inspiration just isn’t there…so I decided to go look for it instead of waiting for it to find me.

It’s past mid April, and the ground is still too soggy to get out into the garden, so I thought I’d bring the garden inside.

Birds, bugs, flowers, small bits of cute that have been tucked away for the winter.

I’m embarrassed to say that I forget half the things I own. That insect is from a poster I bought a couple of years ago. As you can see, he was super easy to cut out.

This is a journal I’ve had for a few years. As sometimes happens with me, it stalled out, so I’m working on revitalizing it.

I’m definitely not afraid to tear everything out of a journal and start from scratch.

Luckily, this one only had a couple of unwanted pages. I’m actually going to add more pages to this little journal!

I splurged on some beautiful floral paper this week and I’m having too much fun positioning my bits and pieces as not to cover up the flowers.

I don’t even know how long I’ve had that bird sticker, probably 10 years. He’s finally found a perfect home.

I’m going to try something new for me, I’m going to attempt to work on one art journal at a time until it’s finished. My biggest problem is the amount of supplies I have out when working on so many projects, and then I get over-inspired and jump into new projects (actually, I get bored easily too) So lets see how this works out.

Well, that’s it for now. It’s still a tad gloomy out there, so I’m going to work on a few pages.

 

Until next time (sooner I hope),

Have a great day,

Thanks for the visit,

~Patty

Gratitude Journal Organization

~ Patty Radish ~ 6 Comments

Last week, I promised a post about my art journaling organizational process, and here it is a week later! I know, I can hardly believe it myself (insert surprised look!)

First, I’m going to show a little of the art journaling tote I’m using for this project.

 I purchased this tote from Hobby Lobby on a 50% off sale, which made it about $12. It’s got loads of pockets and such, but it’s the plastic photo cases I’m going to talk about today. As you can see I have labeled them, and this is where the “process” comes in. It really saves time on having a pile of ephemera to sort through. As I go through each layer, I know which case to grab. I’ve been using this technique over the last year or so, and it really works for me

First layer “Background” pieces: I like to use these on the scrapbook or painted pages to give them a vintage look. Sometimes, I’ll scrape a little paint over them so that they will “blend” into the background.

2nd layer “Paper pieces”: scrapbook paper, origami paper, photocopies of fabric, anything with color or pattern.

3rd layer “Medium ephemera”: these usually consist of the focal piece along with large die cuts or random images. As you can see, I’m building my layers from larger to smaller.

4th layer “Small ephemera”: tickets, small stickers, die cuts, images.

Finally, “Extra small ephemera”: the usual suspects, only smaller.

After all my layers are built, I go around most of the pieces with pencil for contrast. I use a “General” 8B pencil with a “Helix” cap eraser. I use the paint brush to brush off the eraser bits as not to smear the pencil lines. That pencil sharpener  is a Kum AS2, super awesome!

(I’m not paid for sharing links, I just want to be helpful)

Last but not least, the ink stamping. The date stamp of course, but using my decorative stamps kind of went to the wayside, so I’m trying to get back into the habit.

The finished product, a page of my daughter and I shopping before Christmas.

I hope you can see how I built the layers on this page. There is a video of my process here, I just wanted to share a little of the organizational aspects with you today.

I’ve made quite a few promises to myself this year, writing a weekly blog post being one, but also quality instead of quantity. Two to three art journal pages a week is quite enough, those daily challenges can be a bit daunting.

There are lots of other things I have in the works to scale down, use what I have instead of buying, and using my own ingenuity, I’ll share some of that in my next blog post.

Until then,

Thanks for dropping by,

Have a great day,

~Patty

 

 

A New Gratitude Journal

~ Patty Radish ~ 6 Comments

Lately, finding the time, or inspiration, to jump back into art journaling was waning fast. The hustle-bustle of gearing up, then winding down, from the Holidays left me with only enough energy to get back to organizing, planning, and cleaning.

But, because there were still quite a few memories that didn’t make into my  “Holiday Journal”, I started a new one. It’s going to be kind of a “Gratitude” journal. I did one of these few years back, but that one was a daily gratitude journal, and it became too daunting, so I’m going to try a new approach this time and hopefully this one will be easier to keep up with.

Today, I thought I would share a few elements that I used to get this art journal organized.

First, I went through my photos and grabbed some memories. My family was spread all over the place this year and we didn’t have time to take a lot of photos, so grabbed what I could. I made sure to attach the dates on the back to keep them in order.

In my travels over the last month or so I grabbed paper ephemera whenever I thought of it. I’m super glad I did because these bits will be perfect for this project!

Next, I prepped my pages. Here, I prepped one side to show the difference, it shows up much better on the text and scrapbook paper pages, but there you go.

First I scrape some gesso, then a layer of tinted matte medium, then a bubble wrap stamp with more gesso. Most of it gets covered with collage, but small bits poke out enough for interest.

This is a page of my grandson wearing his camouflage antlers while brushing his teeth. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on the blinking lights before taking this photo 😦

I’m still attempting to use up as much random ephemera as I can, and I have to say I’m making quite a dent in it. I actually had to open up another “box of random” to fill my art journaling containers! Speaking of which, in my next blog post I hope to share some of my organizing techniques for art journaling, I almost have it down to a science.

That’s it for now, I’m supposed to be driving over the pass right now, but one of my goals this year is to write one blog post a week, and I didn’t want to put it off longer than I should.

So, until next week (I hope),

Thank you for the visit,

~Patty

Page Spread of Lost Souls

~ Patty Radish ~ 8 Comments

Once in a while, I like to challenge myself to see what I can come up with using the funkiest of ephemera.

I have quite a few plastic photo keepers full of random images that I pull from to fill pages, some of them hover over the recycle bin once in a while, but get a last minute reprieve, and put away for another day. The other day I decided to give some them a chance…with a few fun additions.

The photo at the top right is some wall art I photographed 7 or 8 years ago, I  don’t know why I just couldn’t toss it, maybe because we were on vacation and it just wasn’t photo album material

To me, the challenge is to make random pieces fit together some how. I’m not sure I accomplished this, but I had a lot of fun trying.

So, if you’re like me, and you just can’t bring yourself to throw away your funky bits and pieces, try putting them on one page and see what happens!

See you soon,

Have a great day,

~Patty

(p.s. I’m hoping to write shorter blog posts more often, hope this fits the bill)