Story Book - The Owl and the Pussycat

The idea of the story book was shared with us by Lisa Patencio as part of the Soul Food lessons and is something that I think that I will definitely be doing again.  

I started mine off with some recycled card and added stamps, and paint to it.  I then decided to add random splodges, and this is where the magic happens.  Out of the splodge you create your characters and you end up with a mini story.  

Our theme was the owl and the pussy cat and this is the story line I came up with.,,,

Pete the Pussycat started life as a splodge!

Pete the Pussycat decides to pay Orville the Owl a visit, It a Friday night and he remembers that Orville the Owl had a party to go to at Bobby Beaver's house

Owl says that they have to go by boat and follow the directions that are on the invitation he is clutching in his hands.  They take Orvilles boat the 'Sea Farer' and head off!

 When they arrive on the island Orville is a bit lost, so Pete takes a look and manages to work out how to get to Bobby Beaver's house.

 X marked the spot to Bobby the Beaver's house, they were glad that they arrived safely and were able to meet up with the rest of his friends and party till the sun went down!

As you can see with a bit of paint here and there you can create some really lovely stories.  While it came out of playing with some scrap paper and card you could go on to develop a great story out of the characters that you create.

Why don't you give it a try, take a look in your supplies and experiment.  Do let me know how you get on and leave a comment and let me know what you think.  Blessings!

Painted Pages

I have been taking part in a few courses to stretch myself creatively, to keep my hand in and stay motivated while circumstances can be pressing in what seems like on all sides.  I did a workshop with Mika from Motley Soul called Painted pages.  In this workshop we find new ways to make fabric journals which allows you to combine fabric scraps or old clothes with paper that you might in the past just put in the recycle bin.  Everything takes on a new meaning when you start thinking to yourself exactly what you could make from it. It's not helping with storage space, but it means that I can create on different materials.

Here are some of  the pages I created for the basic pages

Once you start what your left with is a canvas book that you can use to your heart’s content, you can paint on it or sew in it by machine or hand. 

For the painted pages exercise I used different types of material which will give you different  textures on the page, which also responds to mediums in different ways. 

I’ve painted with acrylics, oil pastels, water soluble crayons and pencils and also sewed some of the pages which adds to the textures you can achieve.

Some of the pages worked better with paints than others, but then it meant that other techniques could be tried

This is the front cover, the pages put together as one signature, with a metal butterfly for decoration.  I still have a few pages to experiment on, looking forward to trying out some more ideas.  What new techniques have you been trying?