Art Journal: Thoughts and Dreams with AALL&CREATE

Today I am sharing a project for AALL&CREATE as part of their guest design team for the coming months. I'm super excited & honored to be part of the amazing team and to be creating with their wonderful stamps designs. You'll see weekly projects from me on the weekend and to kick it off I'm sharing an art journal page in my moleskine pocket water color sketchook. 

After a long day I like to relax with my sketchbook and watercolors. Having stamps that inspire me to color is very valuable to me because I don't need to worry about a sketch that I need to make myself & get right to the coloring.

When I saw the designs of Tracy Evans and Katy Paltridge I knew they would go well together! In this project I have stamped a female figure of set #129 in combination with the flower of #123 in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook. A few work in progress pictures: 

I am using Jane Davenport Glitz Sea  mixed with some of the Neutrals set. 

I like using stamps in different ways than designed, so I used the flower petals as Faerie wings & the stems as water waves.

I did color the  petal wings with a flower color because I love the contrast of the warm red pink with the blues and lime greens. 

It's very fun to see how the stem is quite effective as water waves! And I love the many blues in the glitz sea palette to give the body of water some color nuances. 

Looking at her serene face, I think she is enjoying the stillness in nature, lost in her thoughts and dreams. So I decided to stamp those words in the scene. 

I also used the grungy flower to create a bit more texture in the background by partially stamping it randomly over the page with lighter colored stamp pads. Some more close up shots of the finished piece. 

I have used a sakura While Gelly roll to add the highlights for finishing touches.

The stamps sets I used are the following:

123 by Tracy Evans and 129 by Katy Paltridge

Hope you liked seeing this project with watercolors & gorgeous AALL & Create stamps. Please visit their boutique to shop online or to see where you can get these stamps from their many stockists world wide. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome weekend!

WCW: Joan of Art watercolor play (& Review)

A few weeks ago I ordered some fun watercolors from Etsy by the brand Joan of Art and I finally had time to play around with them a bit. I've bought the 4x aquarel sets and you could choose which of the sets you would like to have included. They at the time had a limited edition set called Mardigras and I added that one instead of their earthy tones set. The shop is based in the UK, so shipping to NL was fairly priced (36€ for 4 sets including shipping) and they arrived in a little over 12 days. Bit slow than average from UK, but the UK mail and NL mail delivery were having some issues around that time, so they could be delivered to you faster.

But they arrived, beautifully packaged and I just LOVE unwrapping watercolors! It's like colorful candy but so much better & healthier for you ;) I love that they come with a card which shows you the colors you can mix with them. I do keep the wrappers in a sketchbook with watercolor swatches, but here they are all piled up and the colors swatched out for you to see. They are definitely very pigmented and lovely to work with. The pans come with a little magnet attached to the back so you can create your own palette in an Altoids tin or other metal tins. They also have a fun Watercolor Sketch tin available if you want a complete travel set. The swatches you see here are made in my Strathmore visual journal, with 100lbs watercolor paper.

You can find more information on Joan of Art HERE. Joan of Art (seriously though, what a cool name for an art supply product company right?!) was also kind enough to provide the pigment info on their blog in case people are wondering which pigments are in the set. The Mardigras set was a limited release and sadly already sold out. 

I did a quick color sketch in my moleskine watercolor pocket sketchbook. The base is a small face from the Jane Davenport face stamp set. I drew the rest of the body with a faber castell pitt marker and added some accents with a stabilo all blue pencil (which also activates with water) I was wondering if I could create a skin tone color with all these bright sets and made a mix of van dyke brown with golden yellow and added accents of permanent rose for cheeks and indigo for the shadows. So this sketch was done at night when I didn't have natural light and at first I just didn't like it, too yellow in the face. Later when when I added more blue in shading and warmer tones in orange red around the face in the background the color of the face looks more as a tanned/east asian/indian skin tone. Still really need to practice more but that is what these sketchbooks are for - to play and practice color combinations and see what it brings you. These colors are definitely fun to play around with and I would certainly recommend them to fellow watercolor enthusiasts at any stage in their journey.

Sharing this painting sketch of at a fun - new to me blog- Paint Party Friday.
Art Journal Journey - this month's theme is "world of Fantasy" and this woman borne out of my fantasy also lives in a fantastical colorful world. In my fantasy the world always appears way more colorful as well.  

Hope this little review of the paints was useful.
Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Disclaimer: I was not compensated for this review & bought these paints with my own money and all views posted here are my own. 

Art Journal: The 8th Chakra

This Art Journal page emerged organically from an intuitive art session. And while creating it I also had no idea that the 8th chakra was actually a thing but doing some research after I created this page, apparently it is something I have been working on the past 3 years without realizing I was doing so.

 I played with different materials to explore a resist technique and then wanted to use the symbol 8 from a stencil and add a face to it and she just naturally came into being. Truly amazing!

See more of the process ...

WCW: The Little Mermaid - Jane Davenport Glitz Sea Palette

I have been a lot of fun using my watercolors from Jane Davenport which I bought at a Michaels in Canada on my vacation there in May. The sets are of such a great quality and it's the glitz sea set I bought there. Great colors for watery landscapes and my first try out was to color the mermaid (which is a stamp by sweet pea designs) and make the background into an ocean scene.

A little process shot of when I colored her and was sketching in the background. Those wee little brushes are amazing for details in her hair.

Here you can see the swatches in my swatch book and the larger pans you see and I filled with Daniel Smith interference paints. When you tilt the page at an angle you can see the color shifts in her hair and tail. 

And you may have seen my little watercoloring hyperlapse video's on my Facebook Page or Instagram on IGTV - if you are following me there, but I've also compiled a playlist on my YouTube Channel and add the recent process video's there too to have it all on one place. I might do another mermaid one with a process video later this week too. 

Have you tried this set or any other Jane Davenport sets? If so let me know what you think of it!

Sharing my desk shots with my friends over at Julia's WOYWW#477 this week. I'm so glad the weather is cooling off a little bit here and hoping for a little bit of rain so the succulents and poor wild life animals have some relief! 

Thanks so much for stopping by and hope you all have a great wednesday!

WCW: Mermaid Hair practice (with video tutorial)

Its been a little quiet on my blog, I know. Summer is here, and with the wonderful weather, I rather be outside than inside on my days off. So it means less PC time = not many blog posts. I am sorry about that, though if you are curious what I am making be sure to check out my Instagram page as I share there almost daily. Mostly they are watercolor related as I've decided to practice my watercolor techniques in my moleskine pocket book for world watercolor month. 

Here I used Jane Davenport face stamp and Glitz Sea watercolors (with added in colors from the neutrals set) and Pilot Parallel pens filled with Rohrer and Klingner Sketch ink. 

Also instagram came out with a new feature, like last month (yeah I'm always so slow with updates on phone apps) which is called IGTV and I just decided, you know what, let's jump right in! So I've added some video tutorials there, one specifically shot  vertically for IGTV (they only accept vertical video's) and then altered for my YT channel.

So I'll be linking the YT version below, but since the angle is different, if you prefer the original IGTV vertical angle, you can watch it HERE. 

If you have watch the process video, I'm curious because I kinda like the angle of the IGTV better for this type of tutorial. The lager art journals definitely have to be shot from a birds eye view to get everything in the film. So I'm still figuring out if I should upload to both channels (means extra work!) or just choose the right type of video host and then just link. You can't embed the video link from IGTV yet, so watching directly from the blog is also difficult. So there are pro's and cons for both formats... 

Oh so many new things to try out! Have you tried out IGTV for your tutorials? If so let me know what you think :) 

Linking this to Art Journal Journey - Art for Art's sake July theme - great theme and art can be always a practice to get better at certain skills, right? Messing around with new materials and see what you can create with them, is also just part of the fun :)

Thanks so much for stopping by and have an awesome week!

Art Journal: Brave (Stampotique Originals March new release)

It is the 1st of the month and that means that Stampotique Originals brought out some new stamp releases! I'll be showcasing a few makes with the new lush stamps over the coming days and I wanted to start off this this art journal page I made in my pocket art journal. The large stamp is called Doodle Mania and is designed by Kassa Hayselden. It's such a gorgeous journal stamp and versatile to use. 

Recently I saw interviews of Rose McGowan at the Daily Show and the Late show and she talked about her book Brave, which I think she really is. The art journal page is a tribute to her. I used the highly juicy mermaid markers from Jane Davenport for the colors. And doodled over it with a sakura gelly roll. The alphabet by Terri Richardson really fits well with the style I was going for, 

To see more of the new releases this month, click HERE and there are 7 stamps instead of the usual 6 :) Also there is a new designer on the team, Tini Rubberink, so definitely take a look at her fun and quirky designs!

We also have a new challenge running this fortnight, which is the theme of Mail Art! Next week I'll have some inspiration posted for that as well. 

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

WIP: Watercolor Practice

The past weekend I have been working with my water colors again and sharing some work in progress today.  I took out my Jane Davenports Neutrals and Brights sets and went to work in my Watercoloringbook (A pocket moleskine I stamped some fun rubber stamp images in) This cute little fairy is from Sweetpea designs and I wanted her to have a fun autumnal look. I really loved working on the hair and stripey socks on this one :)

On a scrap piece I colored this fairy from VLVS! and used a lot of glittery watercolors from Cloves and Honey. You can see the finished art journal page HERE.

And another fun VLVS! design and she has an ATC format. A little sneak peek to a future post where I turn this into a little inspiration ATC card.

I absolutely LOVe working with my water colors and I have found that coloring my rubber stamped images with them really brings so much joy :) Sharing these desk shots over at Julia for WOYWW today. Looking forward to catch up with you all. 

Thanks for stopping by and hope you all are having a wonderful day.