Her workbooks do not cost a lot of money, around £5-00 each, and are made of different papers; some lined, some plain, some with cream rather than white paper. Her workbooks also have to be transportable, so she can take them wherever she goes. She has a purse of equipment that she can pick up and on her travels. It included dyes, manuscript pens, graphite pencils, stamps and two coloured ink pads, washi tape, a glue stick, watercolour pencils and water tank brushes (one with bleach in) to name just a few.
Good advice for all of us if we want to get into creating journals.
Her advice included her motto of “Imperfect is Perfect”, which gives encouragement to all worried about a clean page, along with ‘Do not worry what others do’.
| The day was divided into two halves- Play and prepare in the morning, then refining ideas in the afternoon. We started with a large sheet of cartridge paper and news print and we had to try a variety of techniques to make backgrounds: |
Using water dyes · Using them dry we pulled out the colour with a brush over an area. · Using them wet and covered with scrunched up cling film and left to dry to give a marbling effect. · We sprayed fabric dye. · Bleach could be used to remove some colour. |
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We could use collage as well and a variety of old books and catalogues had pieces torn out of them and glued to the paper. These could then be printed over.
The piece of cartridge paper was folded into eight (by halving, halving and halving again). Then we cut up the middle line for ¾ of its length and refolded into a book.
In fact the possibilities are endless. Anne finished by demonstrating using tracing paper over a ‘precious’ design to write on and transferring pictures using old fashioned carbon paper.