At last, a journal journey begins...

I have been threatening for some time to try out an art journal and have finally taken the plunge. For inspiration I am following Trish Bee's Alphabet Discovery Workshop although the group has now been running for a while. Just to make it as challenging as possible (!) I am using an altered book which is another project I have had on my to do list and old books are certainly something I can get my hands on pretty easily!!

So I spent some time randomly doing things to the book, removing pages, adding pull outs, creating niches, layers and pockets, in fact generally getting pretty handy with a craft knife. The workshop is going through the letters in a random order, which is kinda cool, because it means the finished book (because I will be having them in normal alphabetical order) should be quite random as well. The first letter is N, so after all the prep the time comes to actually put colour to the page and ..........

I am struck the artistic equivalent of dumb. Two days of staring blankly at the empty page and wondering if I really can do this. Things weren't helped by a crappy home and work week and I tell you this, not to elicit sympathy, but to explain my final choice of theme for the first page.



So, 'Nil desperandum' it became, and well, nothing is ever as bad as it seems is it? Even though this is just the first page in this book I have already become aware of a few technical difficulties of working in an altered book

- it is hard to stamp!! especially if you've cut holes in it everywhere, but have resolved that one.

- the paper in this book is very porous. Will prep better in future.
- distress inks and colour washes are very difficult to heat set!!! Didn't really think that one through lol. This is important if you want to add layers of colour without ending up with just mud. Or even use a white gel pen lol.

I could go on, but it's just one page. I did think I might write something on it (journal, get it?) along the lines of 'because you can't always see the way ahead', but didn't want to risk messing the whole thing up. Might do it later when I feel a bit more confident. Having got started, I have also nearly finished the next page but am not sure if I'm happy with it yet. It might need a little more work.

That's all for now!