Cullercoats Charms and Curios

Watercolour and Doodling 1 To start learning how to paint with watercolours I began by just painting blocks of colour. Once these were dry I watercoloured patterns onto them.  Wet on dry!  Learning technical watercolour terms as well. Another wait for this to dry then I doodled over and around the shapes and patterns with a black liner pen. A fun and mindful page.  

 Winter Snow and Ice: January 2024 The cold icy start to January and ATC swap prompts of ice and snow were the inspiration for these cards and journal pages. I used a stamped image, a fussy cut image and a die cut image of owls on the same background to create 2 cards and a journal page.  This shows that you can be creative and use what you have when following tutorials.  If the tutorial uses a stamp and you don't have it you can use a cut out or die cut instead or vice versa.   To get a winter background I used a brayer to roll layers of acrylic paint onto kraft card.  I started with white then also used a light and dark blue.  I layered these until I was happy with the look.     I then let the background dry before cutting it down to make the front of 2 x 6" cards and 3 ATCs. I went around the edges with chipped sapphire distress ink to darken them and create a border. I stamped out an owl image in a dark brown ink and coloured it with alco...

Art Journal: First Pages I have several sets of watercolours which I was lucky enough to be given by a friend who had tried water colouring and did not like it.  I decided that I needed to swatch these onto the kraft card so I have an idea of how the colours are for reference when using them in the art journal.  I used some letter stamps to stamp the heading - then drew out some circles to paint my swatches in. I painted each swatch as they are in the paint palette - unfortunately I do not know the name of the colours.  The circles looked a bit boring and bare so I decided to decorate them with doodling using a black fine liner and white paint pen. To swatch my koi watercolours I die cut an artists easel and painted them onto this. I made a background using the blue, red and and green paints from this set of watercolours.   I then stamped with similar stamps used on the front cover of the journal using a waterproof ink.  The splodges are stamped using distr...

  Starting an Art Journal  2025 A new year has come around again and I am looking at how I craft.  I have previously made cards and ATCs but now have enough cards to give to friends and family for the rest of my life and probably longer.  I am also trying to be a bit more arty and use different mediums ands techniques.  So an art journal seems like a good solution to do this.  I found a 8" x 8" scrapbook I have had lying around for a while and have decided to use this.  I think it has enough pages to do one single page a week or two pages of a double spread a fortnight for the year and feel that this should be achievable.  So here we go.... Making the Cover The journal pages are Kraft card so was unsure weather to use Kraft or white card for the front.  I therefore made two backgrounds one using Kraft card and one with white.  Firstly I painted a layer of white gesso on the card and let this dry.   I then painted over this with thre...