Life in the Sunshine: Kate Crane & The Secret Swappers

Meeting people off the internet is never my favourite thing to do as I'm a shy, nervous person and feel I can be more myself on the net than in person but that didn't stop me meeting my friends the Secret Swappers who have supported me and been there for me for the past few years and I'm so glad I did because they were all lovely! And funny! I also made LOTS and LOTS of art journal pages including 5 in a class with Kate Crane, an additional bonus of the weekend at the beautiful Foxhill in Frodsham. Here's the pages I made in the Kate Crane class first of all:

And here's the pages I made in my own time:

Hogservations is a page about my youngest doggy, Henry who we have nicknamed Henhogs, shortened to Hogs. I got the silhouette in the second image from Silhouette and it looked so much like Henry that I had the idea to write some Hogservations, how Henry sees the world. I cut out his head and stuck it on a body from a magazine

Another image from Silhouette which made me think about what I would do if I wasn't afraid:

Two much darker pages in my Raw art journal. The images are from the internet/pinterest and I didn't want to do anything with them other than surround them in black and add a typed quote.

Another page from my Raw journal, this page is quite emotional as the lyrics from an Evanescence song, Snow White Queen remind me of a time when I had a breakdown as a new carer to my husband who was sectioned only months into our marriage. I printed the image on normal printer paper from an inkjet printer and used mod podge to do an image transfer, I like the way it comes out grainy as it suits the emotions I feel when I look at the page, ghost like and broken:

I LOVE this Rebecca Sinz image called Despair. I always imagined it on a darker page but I just started dabbing titan buff with paperartsy Moonlight and really liked the effect. I coloured the image in with promarkers and stamped the edges with a Tim Holtz stamp then added the typed quote

The next three pages are for an online Christy Tomlinson class I'm taking called She Had Three Hearts. A simple background created with paint dabbers, three pages the same but the first with writing outside the heart to describe the heart I share with the world, one with writing around the heart to describe the heart I share with my family and one with writing inside the heart to describe the heart I share only with myself

I was inspired by the lovely Gill and her gorgeous vintage ledger journal to journal straight into a music book I have, previously used to tear pages out of and use as backgrounds. This was one of the first page I completed at the Secret Swappers meet up and I gave myself permission to create art freely, without restrain or judgement, using a Finnabair image: