New Whimsical Collage Dolls

I'm still into making these whimsical collage dolls, totally inspired by my favorite artists, Christina Romeo, Mindy Lacefield and Roben Marie Smith. I decided to fill up my latest shopping bag art journal with my new dolls. Take a look.

I really enjoy adding the pop of color with tissue paper.

 It's such a fun way to use up my scrap paper and be totally free with dressing the dolls.

I hope to scan each page, so that I can make these into greeting cards or tags.

I really liked using the 2014 black chalk board style calendar for some of my pages. You can see more of that in my previous post. If you go to Paper Source, you can buy the 2016 black chalk style calendars really cheap now.

I also love using the black polka dot tissue paper.

I try to leave some white space on each page where I can later stamp sentiments, such as "Happy Birthday" for cards.

Now, I really want to name these whimsical dolls, but can't think of anything clever. My other dolls are called "Paige", but these style of dolls need a new name...any suggestions?

Do you remember I made a very small art journal? I'm also going to fill one of them up with my whimsical dolls. I just started page 1.

You would think since it's so small, it would be faster to create, but not so. It's really hard to glue down itsy bitsy pieces of paper and tissue, but it's worth the effort!

As you can see above, my mini art journal is about 1/16th the size of my shopping bag journal...so mini!

Have a great week!

Altered Shopping Bag Turns Art Journal

In my previous post, I mentioned how I purchased an adorable shopping bag. I've never purchased a shopping bag "just because", but this time I did. I thought about what to do with it for a few days and this is what I came up with...

I turned it into a hybrid midori - art journal. Below are lots of pictures of how I made this. It started with this little shopping bag.

Next, I deconstructed it. Separating the sides.

And separating the bottom.

I cut along the sides.

Resulting in two pieces.

 Fold in the sides and glue into the inside cover.

Cut about half of the bottom flap off from the bottom side.

Now, turn bottom fold up and cut about half of the flap.

Glue down the bottom flaps onto each side.

Glue down the bottom flaps on top of each other, making the spine.

I sewed around the spine and added some of the extra shopping bag pieces around the center.

 Inside view.

I cut a piece of card stock for the inside covers.

I covered the card stock with coordinating paper.

I clipped the corners of the coordinating paper at a diagonal and glued the sides down. Next, I glued them onto the front and back covers.

I punched some holes at the top and bottom of the spine and threaded the holes with some elastic.

 The elastic will hold my inside journal pages.

 Here are some of my inside pages.

I recycled an old calendar and cut up the pages and trimmed off the edges.

And folded the calendar pages in half. I also added some plain white mixed media paper in between.

Then I added a few embellishments to get the pages started.

I can't wait to start filling up my art journal and look for more fun small shopping bags!

Ink Figures

Thanks to Jackie Peter's blog, I found a wonderful artist, Lynn Whipple. After being on Lynn Whipple's site, I found Carla Sonheim and some of her on-line classes.

I watched Carla's "Creating Ink Figures" class and created these three drawings.

These drawings started from ink blobs, then you add black and white pen marks to complete the image. I knew the ink blobs were going to be people, so I had an idea of the shapes I wanted. The picture below is how the drawings started.

It was a fun exercise, it was like working backwards. I used the Japanese Sumi drawing ink from Daiso for this project.

Then I also watched Carla's "Easy Tombow Rabbits" on-line course. It's a cool technique of using your black Tombow pen and water. Instead of a rabbit, I drew a girl.

My current project is turning this shopping bag into an art journal.

I found this adorable bag at a little store in San Francisco and knew I had to make something with it. Stay tuned, it's almost done. 

New Mini Art Journals

I was at Paper Source the other day and bought some fun black and white paper. It inspired me to make these mini art journals.

 The book above measures about an inch high.

 These other two books measure just two inches high.

I filled them with water color paper. The gold ribbon around the book is actually elastic, which keeps the book closed.

Below are a few photos of how I put it together.

 I used three pieces of card board for each of the covers. Glued it to my new papers.

 I glued a coordinating piece of paper for the spine.

 The inside is just a long strip of water color paper accordion folded.

I attached the gold elastic to the spine, from the inside and added a small flower and tag to the front.

I can't wait to fill them!

I hope you had a great weekend, I love the long days of summer!