Doctor Who Journal on A Vintage Journey

Hello Blog Land, I am the guest blogger over on A Vintage Journey with my Doctor Who Fan Girl Journal!! I was very excited to be asked to create a project for this awesome challenge site. You can check out my full tutorial on making the book cover there. The inspiration of their design team is really great. If you haven't been over to the blog please take a look at my post & have a browse around. The challenge this month is All Squared Up.

Here is my book using Eileen Hull's Journal die. Inside are 3 Midori style books that can be easily removed to work on. These books are a work in progress mainly because I need to go on a ephemera scavenger hunt. There is not a lot of readily available geek programing scrapbook paper. I will show you what I have come up with in the meantime. All my covers were done in fabric as I could get themed fabric for these shows!

Doctor Who- I added a laser die purchased at a Scrapbook Convention. Inside this book is paper that coincides with episodes. I am using the Paper House Discovery line. Stay tuned for some cool geek pages!

Games Of Thrones- OK seriously this show is insanely amazing. I read the books well 4 of them cause I am impatiently waiting for #6 to be released before I read #5. The show just does not disappoint. Last season finale had to be one of the best in TV history. For those of you watching last week's episode was CRAZY did not see that one coming. Don't worry no spoilers! Pinterest is a great source for images for these types of books. 

First page inside, made a pocket with a travel theme & printed out a map of Westeros. My first quote to open the book is very appropriate. "Winter is Coming" with a great drawing of Ned Stark on the Iron Throne. *This was found on Pinterest and was drawn by Marilia Araujo. Please see below for more info on the drawings & images used. The page peaking out is a downloaded image. I wasn't thrilled with the quality when it was printed out. 

Star Wars-now where did I put all my Star Wars ephemera? I know I bought paper like 8 or so years ago, where did I stash it? You can actually buy Star Wars paper & stickers but mine did not arrive in time for this post. I added a tag from one of the million Star Wars toys we own. 

People Magazine did an entire book which I have pulled apart & will be using the images for my book. This will be my middle layout because it is too frickin cool! 

Well that is it for now. Definitely a book in progress, I am seeing some art journal pages, some collage. It will be fun to see where this takes me. I will keep you posted! Thanks for joining me on this fun journey. I hope I can inspire you to make a Fan Book. I am seeing Supernatural in my very near future!

Images:
One of the challenges with Pinterest is trying to find out if the designer is the pinner & doesn't mind the picture being used. This book is for personal use & when possible I did a link to the original. I also did not use pictures that were obviously copy right. Also credit goes to BBC for the photos of The Doctor's on my cover!

*affiliate-I am on a number of design teams & occasionally receive product for posts. I do work with products I love and try to find the best ways to use them!!

Inspired By... Athanasia Papantoniou

Hello Blogland, today I am inspired by the wonderful art of Athanasia Papantoniou, who is a member of the Finnabair creative team as well as quite a few others. 

Here is the art journal page that inspired me.To expand on the thought of "Inspired By" if you are like me you get to see all the wonderful creative art out on Instagram, Facebook, blogs... Quite often I see art that completely inspires me to make the project or learn the technique. It is rare that I take the time to follow through on that brief flash of excitement! 

I made the point of following through on this one. In my busy schedule of designing it was a nice change to be the student. I did change the page up quite a bit, but do you thing it is a copy or different enough to be simply inspired by? 

I can't quite decide! Athanasia's blog post has a full tutorial & she also made a video so please go check it out here & hopefully you will play along!
You can find more of Athanasia's work on her blog Me and myself.

Guest Blogger for The Crafter's Workshop!

So excited to be a guest blogger for The Crafter's Workshop! I have been a big fan of their stencils for ever and now I get a chance to share on their blog! I have a tutorial up with lots of pictures so go check it out!!! This project looks complicated but I have made the steps easy so you can make an up-cycled brush, pen, whatever holder too!

I have another post this month so keep an eye out we will be playing with canvas!

Seth Apter Journal Play

How do we create a grungy, metallic art journal page?

Seth Apter has a line of stencils, stamps, and die cuts. I have taken a few classes with him & not only are his products unique and different he is a super nice guy and really good teacher! You can buy his products directly from his shop or in your local scrapbook &  paper arts stores.

The start of the adventure...

  Let's start with corrugated cardboard. Inexpensive & easy to find! Add a coat of gesso, lots of stenciling using flexible modeling paste. To get an idea of what this will look like go here. Once this was dry it was time to add some paint. I used DecoArt Media fluid acrylics and painted the background in varying colors of blue/teal, using a bit of Paynes grey with the blues. Once that was dry some random stamping in archival ink gave nice interest & texture. 

Have you always wanted to learn how to shade? 

 Using a fine brush I painted darker on the sides of the raised areas, blending the paint with my finger as I went. This gave some nice depth to the images. Using a hard piece of foam I hit the high points of the stenciled areas with Metallic Luster, this is one of my favorite techniques! Just adds that wonderful, shiny, metal look that is nice & grungy. I used a quote stamp of Seth's as a focal point. His products fit into each other which is too cool, leaving all kinds of options. 

Time for some die cuts! 

I had cut a bunch of shapes from gelliplate papers. Choices.... In the end I was feeling circle-ish. I simply took the 2 inside circles from the Robo Ring die, placing one inside the other and cut. This left me with 3 circle rings and a middle full circle, which I did not use. I stamped on these with archival ink. I also cut the same out of cardboard- about as thick as a cereal box. The trick is to run the die cuts through the machine 2x- as in forward and back (leaving the sandwich in place so the dies do not shift) to cut this heavier material. 

After distressing the edges so no cardboard shows through simply glue down the cardboard circles with a strong glue. I left off the pretty tops to keep the excess paint from getting on them. Fill in the circles with DecoArts crackle paste. When dry the paint on the bottom layer shows through the cracks. 

Let's add a pop of color!

I used fluid acrylic which is enough to color the paste but once dry doesn't cover the crack effect.  Once that was dry I glued my gelliplate cut-outs on top. 

Adding paint on the inside of the circles gave it that depth. Almost done! Adding a key after wrapping a copper metal coil around it and a tag that was painted and stenciled with the word enter. Voila! The tag covered the back pages tab which I had found distracting.

That's it! This was a super fun page to work on, although with all the modeling paste etc. I would work on it, set it aside, work on it. Tip: have a few projects on the go to prevent staring at wet paste willing it to dry faster. You do want to let these pastes dry naturally for maximum effect. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Leave me a comment if there is a project you would like to see on my blog!  

Supplies:

Seth Apter:

  die by Spellbinders- Robo Ring

 stencils by Stencil Girl:

-numbers, story time & urban outsiders 

stamps by Impression Obsession:

-context, journal coins & pattern play

DecoArt Media:

 Fluid Acrylics- cobalt turquoise,  cobalt teal, paynes grey, 

quinacridone burnt orange.

 Crackle Paste   

Metallic Lustre- copper kettle

Americana Acrylic- Lemon Yellow

Ranger: archival ink- jet black

Daler Rowney- black acrylic ink

Heart Tag With Linnie Blooms

I have a heart tag tutorial over on the Linnie Blooms blog today. Come check out this fun project using Seth Apter stencils, and Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists. Here is a close up! You can find the post here. 

 Enjoy!