Autumn-Inspired Journal Pages

The last two days have been kind of cold, rainy, and gloomy.  It helps to sit by a window with colorful blooms and foliage to gaze upon.

Although most of the leaves have fallen at our home in the mountains, they are just getting going here.  Hope the sun comes out to shine on them soon!

To counter the gray bleak weather, I got out my Moleskine journal and worked on some autumn pages. 


I really like this spread.  I used acrylic paints in a fall palette and just added mottled splotches all over the page to resemble an autumn forest.  On the right, I pasted in an actual photo of some of the trees bordering the Christmas tree farm that we often ride through at the top of the hill at our mountain place.

I made a transparency on the computer of the same photo, and sewed it on the top and bottom  of the left-side page using hand stitching.  Then I machine-stitched a piece of ribbon on the left edge.  This page now has almost a holographic effect.


Above the photo on the right side, I hand-printed a quotation from John Muir directly on to the painted surface. 

It reads,

     "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. 

     Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. 

     The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy,

     while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

So true!

Recently, Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine had a three-part series on journaling by Dawn Sokol.  It was called "Pages in Stages."  She now has a DVD by the same name available from Interweave Press. 

I have been more or less following her techniques.  I will paint the background pages first, then add collage elements such as images and text from magazines and catalogs.  Then, you add journaling text when you feel inspired to write something on that page.  You don't have to go in any special order.  It's really fun to work this way.  I like having some painted backgrounds ready to go when I have some time indoors to play with my pages!  I painted a lot of backgrounds with acrylics, watercolors, and water-soluble crayons at the picnic table at our mountain place.  Lots of inspiration!

I painted this background on October 10, 2010:  10-10-10!

I discovered that I loved this color palette after making this journal spread.  The photo has a bit of glare, probably due to the gloss gel medium I used on the collage elements.  (Note:  the Biltmore paper is a wine label from the Biltmore house vineyard.)

This one has lots of travel brochure information about Grandfather Mountain in Boone, NC.  I wrote some personal memories of the Blue Ridge Parkway. over the images.

On this one, I painted the background with acrylics, images about the Blue Ridge Parkway from a travel brochure, illustrations done with markers, stamping, and lettering on a collaged napkin.

Here are a couple of unfinished pages.

This one has Stages One and Two finished.  The backgrounds are painted with acrylics.  I found this great palette and paintbrush image and the text in a magazine sent to Subaru owners.  Normally that kind of mail goes right into the recycle bin.  Haven't decided what the next step on this one will be.

 

Journal pages are a great place to try out various techniques.  On this one, I used a real oak leaf both as a positive and negative image.  I printed with it on the left, and painted around it on the right. I closed the journal while the paint was still wet, and some of the orange paint colored in the leaf on the right.

Yesterday, my visiting deer reappeared in the same place in the back yard.  I thought I was getting some great pictures with the zoom lens on my husband's camera, but the battery was dying and I got nothing.  By the time I sneaked back around the house with my own little Canon, they were running away.  Can you find the deer in this picture?  (Hint:  our deer are the variety known as "Whitetail.)

His "white flag" is sticking up on the left side of the photo between two tree trunks.  That is often the view we see of deer.  By the time we know they are there, they are running away!