Chickadees or Coletits?

Hello lovely visitors, today I am sharing another spread in my nature journal, you have all been so kind and encoraging about it, so thanks for that!!

It's not always easy to find suitable subjects to draw and paint here in the Northern Hemisphere in February. The weather has been so cold and windy, it's hard to even go out for walks. So for this spread I took inspiration from photographs, what I can see from my craftroom window, and my imagination...

This little chickadee was mostly copied from a photo on the wonderful Pamelia's blog, but I also looked at other photographs. Here in the UK we don't have chickadees, but our native coletits are very, very similar, though apparently not related... I used watercolour pencils, Prisma Premier pencils, watercolours and even a black Tombow marker.

Like usual, I also added strips of washi, old book paper and here also a few scraps of rice paper and a little stamping on tissue.. I love playing with little bits of collage around my hand painted elements to complete the pages.

This branche is based on the budding branches of a big chestnut tree I can see out of the window of my artspace (studio would be too big a word for it lol).

And here finally a couple of feathers, they are totally done out of my imagination, I just needed something to fill up the space....

The cover for this journal, as some of you may remember, was made with the Eileen Hull journaling die. I love that with the help of the elastic, I can take the actual journal in and out of the cover, which makes it much easier to paint. Here you can see it inside the cover.

Well, that's it for today. Have a lovely weekend  and thanks for your visit like always!

xxxxx

And the Magic Continues

Hello everyone, welcome and thank you for visiting again. Sorry this is my second post today. The first one was scheduled before we left and is a DT piece for Snazzys...

If you have been here earlier in the week, you will know that I am still away in France, having a magical time. It is just so beautiful here, hence the title of this post. While here I am working on a nature journal.
In my last post I showed some foxgloves, there are many growing around here and for some reason they fascinate me. So here is another page that features them among other things.

Like with my previous pages, it's a mixture of hand drawn and painted images and stamping. I think so far this is my favourite page, even though I am not happy with my hand painted images, I think I need a lot more practice....
Anyway, here are some close ups, warts and all:

Here I warmed the foxgloves up a bit more, probably a bit too much....

Some stamped butterflies, I think it's a Crafty Individual stamp...

hand painted Margeritues, they went rather wonky

From a Tim Holtz set

We are still here for a few more days, so I know there will still be another page or two, so bear with me...
Hope you are having a good and creative time where ever you are, thank you for visiting and see you next time.

Nature Garden Journal

Bonjour everyone, lovely to see you here in my little place on the web.

Today I am sharing something a little different... As many of you know, I am in France at the moment and while here decided to play in a brand new journal. In this journal I am going to combine my two great arty loves, stamping and water colour painting.

Some of the elements you see on this page were hand drawn, the hazel twig on the left and some of the flowers on the right, some of the other flowers, the bee and the butterflies were stamped, as was some of the background obviously. I used a combination of water colour paint, water colour pencils and Distress Inks, as well as some Jet Black Archival ink for the stamped images.
Here are some close ups still

Hope you like it, - I did say it was a little different didn't I lol.

I'll leave you with a couple of photos of the lovely little garden where I sit and paint. It's gorgeous weather here, warm but not too hot and so peaceful and beautiful. I feel very privileged

.Thank you for visiting and I hope that you have some sunshine and beauty surrounding you where ever you are.
I am going to add this to the Simon Says Stamp and Show "Good to be Green" challenge