Documented Life: June

June Theme
Travel Journaling

This was a bit difficult theme for me. In my country, kids have the major school holiday in summer - the whole two months (July and August). So families usually plan their holidays for this time of the year. At around May, people start asking the ominous question "where are you going on holiday this year?" as if it was compulsory to go somewhere in summer. Here, holiday means going south to the sea (we are in the middle of Europe and have no sea) and I don't really care about temperatures exceeding 25°C. Also, I was particularly annoyed this year because I had two destinations in my mind and none worked out. And I wasn't really in the mood for discussing this with anyone. So "Um, I don't know yet, I'm waiting for some last-minute deals" is my "official" answer this year.

Paper Artsy Theme 12: Stencils

The new PaperArtsy theme is Stencils. Me and stencils? Never heard of them! Oh, just kidding...
Stencils are an integral part of my art life. I have lots of them (over one hundred, I think, most of them my design, hand-cut or silhouette-cut), I use them often... So it's very hard for me to come up with something original.

"Dark Passenger" journal

I have one journal that I'm occasionally working in - I call it the "Dark Passenger" Journal. I don't really want to share many details about it because I use it to vent my frustration and negative thoughts. So, only a preview of the pages I've finished so far.

I wanted to have this journal ready for whenever I "needed" it so I created some background starters. I painted 4 sheets of A3 (297×420mm /11.7×16.5in) cardstock on both sides (that is 8 backgrounds in 4 different colour combinations - 2 each) I cut each sheet into 4 pieces (slightly smaller than A5 size - I trimmed the edges a bit - 140×200mm, 5.5×7.9in). So, it total, I have 16 sheets, 32 possible pages (are you still with me? LOL). No more mathematics from this point on.

I wanted to have a unifying element on these pages - so, all of the quotes are printed on a DYMO label maker and all the focal words are the same size and the same font (I cut the letters on my Silhouette machine).

I will not be sharing this journal - this is just to let you know it exists.

Paper Artsy Theme 11: Hidden Objects

This week's PaperArtsy challenge is about Hidden Objects. 

I had so many ideas about this theme but in the end, I went for a hidden message which I hid under a flap:

I don't particularly like how this page turned out. It was a series of hits and misses - well, mostly misses and my vain attempts to fix them. I fought with the material, with the inks, forgot to prime the page, forgot I'd been planning to do some stamping in the background. I spent so much time on this page just because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing...

Altered Bottle

PaperArtsy's current challenge is about Bottles. I already painted my Bottle page in my PaperArtsy challenge journal more than an month ago [find out why here], so now I decided to alter an actual bottle.
I saw a lovely altered bottle project some time ago over at Finnabair's blog and but never got round to trying it - so now at least I had an incentive...

PaperArtsy - Guest Blog Post

I was really excited when Darcy asked me to write a blog post for PaperArtsy. 

"Me? Really? Are you serious?"

It was a slightly different feeling for me when I was making something for a lot of people to see... I had four topics to choose from (I chose "Bottles"), a deadline to meet... You know - a bit more resposibility! 

I had quite a lot of time so the worst thing for me was that I had a page I couldn't share with anyone for more than a month...

This is what I made:

You can find the blog post here.

Thank you, PaperArtsy team, for this wonderful opportunity!!

Documented Life: May

May Theme
Touchy Feely (Texture)

Finally a topic I can relate to - I LOVE texture!

I already mentioned this - some time ago, a friend was going through my journal saying "you almost want to touch it..." and I was like "Oh my, DO touch it, it's meant to be touched!" I just love to run my fingers over the texture of my artwork!