Sunday morning art journaling & a new texture

*** you'll find the texture & download at the end of this post ***

I love spending Sunday mornings in my study/studio. The morning light coming through the window lightens up the room and inspires me to take out my paints and stuff and just do something with them. This morning, I finished another double page for my Inspiration Journal, a little booklet made out of old book covers on which I create paintings to inspire and encourage myself on my creative journey.

I also finished the front cover of the Inspiration Journal the day before. I wanted to keep it simple but also inviting to open the book. I just love this paper with those happy smiling pigs. In German speaking parts, pigs stand for good luck, and some good luck vibes seemed a good idea for my journey, wherever it will take me, and whatever road I will find the courage to follow. I might add some details to the wings, later on, but all in all, I'm quite happy with the result.

My Inspiration Journal isn't actually book yet. It's just a pile of painted book covers at the moment, but it's all coming together nicely, and once I have all the pages finished, I'll punch some holes and voilà, my own little inspiration book.

As I had some paint left, and I don't really like to waste my paint, I decided to use it on a sheet of canvas, and make a simple texture for photo processing out of it.

And here's the result, my little Listen To Your Violet Heart texture. You can use it with or without the text, just as you like. I'm not quite sure how it is, to be honest, but maybe you'll find some use for it, the text (a stamp) didn't quite turn out as I wanted in the scanning process. And I'm still learning what works best as a texture for processing photos with.

Here's the link for the download (or click on the image above), if you'd like to give it a try yourself.

Here are two examples where I used the texture - turning a sunny winter landscape into, well, something a bit, hmm, quite weird, I admit - I was just in the mood to play around and be a little bit silly ;).

I guess you just have to like the colour purple/violet for this :)

Painted Texture - Jazz

I finally managed to get my painting stuff out and produce a hand made, painted texture, rather than a Photoshop one. It's fun to do and I've learnt a lot of great techniques and tricks from my fabulous painting teacher in the last 15+ years and I got a lot of inspiration and a few new tricks from the texture e-course (where I'm slowly catching up and am hoping to get through all the remaining lessons before the classroom closes next week). So, now I just have to start making more textures :-). It's good to take out those paints and brushes and use them for something a bit different.

What is quite new to me is the size of the paper, canvas, cardstock etc. I'm working with. I'm so used to a rather big canvas or sheet of paper, but for textures, that's no good. If it's too big, it won't fit on to the scanner. So I'll have to get used to working with about an A4 size now. The advange is that it takes a lot less working space, which is good as I have to work in my study/library/studio and have to be carefuel all the time not to splash any paint on the walls or carpet of a rented flat. I so wish to have my own proper little atélier one day...

So that's what I've come up with on a productive Sunday:

Not sure yet, really, if it's any good as a texture and with what kind of pictures to use it. It might actually be a bit too "strong" in its own way. Well, I'm still learning :-). But it sort of seems to work with this:

Feel free to download the texture here (or click on the texture image) and give it a try. And if you like, let me know if it's any good or not :-).

While working away at the texture, I've been listening to a CD which I rediscovered the other day and which is just perfect to listening to while getting creative with brush and paint: Choose your boots by Fredrik Lundin Overdrive. I discovered jazz relatively late and usually prefer the old jazz stuff along with any music from the 1920s and 30s. But there's some modern bands I really like.

My favourite track is "The long haul", but I couldn't find that on Youtube.

I've been racking my brain trying to find a suitable name for the texture, and finally, I've come up with one - I'm just going to call it "jazz" :-)

New texture - Autumn leaves (I know, I know...)

It's Sunday again, which means that I have the time and energy to spend some time at the computer working through some of the online classes and experimenting with creating textures. And that's what I've come up with, using several layers to create a texture. The layers are scans of book covers, old paper and a piece of hand made paper with leaves and dried flower petals in it, which is absolutely gorgeous.

One of the biggest problems with creating your own textures really is finding a suitable name for them. I'd like to try to avoid just giving them numbers, but deciding on a name just seems to take up at least as much time as creating them. Well, I decided to call this one "Autumn leaves textures".

Another great problem with a texture is the question of where to use it. The texture itself might be vey pretty indeed, but is it any good for being used with a photograph? And if yes, with which picture and in what way? This texture has much of an autumn feel, I think. I was therefore looking for some pictures taken earlier this year, with some brown tones. I found one which I thought might be suitable and gave it a try:

I think it works quite well and I like the sort of painterly effect of it and the bright whitish patches help to intensify the cool feel (this was taken in late January/early February on a very cold and grey day) and goes well with the snow on the roof.

Admittedly, this picture (and the texture) does not fit the spring season at all. At this time of the year, we're weary of the cold and the bare look of everything outside and welcome the warmer weather and each tiny little piece of fresh green and colourful blossom that appear outside. But unfortunately, I'm still without my camera *sigh* so all I can do is using my old pictures - and experiment with creating textures :).

If you would like to try it out yourself, feel free to download it here or click on the image of the texture above.

But oh I wish I had my camera back! I feel like I've been waiting for ages! Spring is early this year and it's been exceptionally warm in the last day or two and the trees are all rapidly beginning to bloom. The magnolia tree in my street will be in full bloom very soon, as will everything else - and I can't take any pictures of it all :-(.

So I'll just have to go on experimenting with textures in the meantime, I suppose. I've even started with a painted one and hopefully, I'll manage to finish it today and scan it next week. I've also set up my easel in my study and started working on a big canvas to make a new picture for the living room. I've slightly altered the colour scheme and the picture which is there now just doesn't really fit anymore. That's the convenient thing with painting - if you want a new picture, you can just paint one. It's much cheaper than having to buy something and it saves you the trouble of having to find the matching colours as well. And it's fun to do as well :-). It just takes some time...

Grunge brush set & my first texture

I've been busy all evening - while watching Miss Marple solve mystery after mystery :-) - with creating a first proper set of brushes. I call them Seaside Grunge Brushes, because I used an image of some very rusty texture which I took last autumn on Torquay pier as a base. I haven't had much time yet to try them out and see if they're actually usable, but I'm nevertheless quite pleased with them :-). And now that I've got a first taste of making brushes, I certainly will do more of them :-)

Here's what they look like:

Seaside grunge brush set

Feel free to download here (or click on image) and use them - and let me know if they're any good :-):

Of course when I had finished them I wanted to try them out quickly, so I created a simple brown background and started stamping them down - and out came a texture :-).

Texture No 1

Again, feel free to download here (or click on image) and use it. I hope it's useful... I only tried it out once and very quickly to see if it worked at all:

 

I hope that I got all the download links right here. Let me know if there are any problems.

Well, making brushes and textures certainly is great fun, and not as difficult as I thought. It's fun to do them all in PSE, but I must say that I'm also looking forward to making some brushes and texture using good old paper and paint and other stuff.

Anyway, time to turn in, long day tomorrow... Have a wonderful start into the new week!

Doodle Brushes

I've learnt how to do brushes and turn them into a collection in Kim Klassen's e-course The Art of Texture (where, of course, I'm way behind. The class ended last week, and I'm only about half through. 3 more weeks time to finish...). But anyway. I've figured out (I think/hope) how to turn the brushes/collection into a Zip-file/folder and found a free file sharing website, 4shared, to make them downloadable. Of course I managed to register with a wrong e-mail adress (wrong country code ending, which is the thing that easily happens when you have too many e-mail accounts with too many different country codes and a "midget's brain" (Muggehirn, as  we say). It doesn't seem to be possible to change the e-mail in ones account. Ah well, it seems to work alright, I suppose I just won't get any e-mails from them. I think that once I start seriously uploading stuff for free downloads, I'll just have to create a new account. I certainly have enough spare e-mail addresses...

The brushes I made are just some doodles, and I don't really know how or where to use them myself, to be honest, and I don't expect that you'd actually want to download and use them. This is rather experimenting with it all and seeing if and how it actually works. So these are the doodles, they come as a collection in one ABR-file, which can be used as brushes in PSE (I created them in PSE8, so I haven't really any idea in which versions they can be used. I'm still learning...):

Doodle brushes

Anyway, here's the link for the download: Doodle brushes.zip or just click on the image. If you like, download them and try them out, and if you do, let me know if it actually works or not. As I say, it's the first time I'm doing this and I haven't really got a clue... It's all a big learning experience at the moment.

As I'm writing this I just realise that I might have made a bit of a mistake when creating the brushes. When selecting them and saving them as individual brushes, I think I should have made them a certain size, instead I didn't define the size of the selection tool. So I've no idea what size they are and they may just be far too small. Well, I'm afraid this comes from when one's just of a very impatient nature and never really reads through things/instructions/tutorials/one's own notes properly. Did I mention that I'm still learning and pretty much clueless?

But I hope to be able to make more of these brushes (and nicer/better ones), as well as textures, in the future and share them with you. I also have to see about a scanner. I used the one at work and I'm not happy with it at all. I don't know if it is just an old one, or not working properly anymore or, more likely, I just don't really know how to use it properly.