Special Guest Spotlight on JO - LET'S ART JOURNAL June 2023

 Hello everyone!

This month, we are very pleased to welcome Jo - Let's Art Journal, who was one of our fabulous February 2023 winners. 

We hope you enjoy her take on our June Challenge and do please visit her Blog which is linked below, and also our social media channels to watch the Guest Designer video! 

My name is Jo and I live by the sea in the North West of England with my hubby. I started Art Journaling in 2015 as a way of expressing my life through words and pictures and I’m captivated by the variety of techniques and materials that can be used to create so many different styles of art. My pages are inspired by what I see, do, feel and hear so it’s personal to me and allows me to express myself, it’s a fun way to record life events and memories too. Over the years my passion for art has expanded to making cards and tags, especially for my family and friends as well as decorations and items for around the house. I love nothing better than to experiment with different techniques and products, get creative, put my ideas into practice and have lots of fun doing so! This has now become a passion of mine and I’d like to share it with you.

Social Media links:

Let's Art Journal BLOG

Q & A with Jo

How long have you been art journalling?

I started Art Journaling in 2015 as a way of expressing my life through words and pictures and I’m captivated by the variety of techniques and materials that can be used to create so many different styles of art. My pages are inspired by what I see, do, feel and hear so it’s personal to me and allows me to express myself, it’s a fun way to record life events and memories too.

What's your favourite colour palette to use?

My favourite colour palette is aqua and blues; ranging from light blue to turquoise to midnight blue. I find this palette calming and relaxing, and I’m drawn to it because they are colours from nature, being found in the sky and sea.

What is your favourite supply or product?

For me there are no rules to art journalling, so anything goes and my supplies are quite eclectic as I love everything Mixed Media. It's hard to choose a favourite product, but it would probably be white gesso because it’s great for pristine white backgrounds, to prime the page for paints/inks so making the page bleed-proof, it can be also used as a resist and possibly my favourite use is to just cover up any mistakes that I make (so it’s my “best friend” too – smile!).

Why do you enter art challenges?

I love entering art challenges because they provide inspiration for my pages, they are a great way to meet and chat to like minded-people, they help me learn new techniques and products, they are a wonderful way to make and also stay in touch with crafty friends, and of course they are great fun!

Jo's Interpretation of our June Challenge

Jo says:  I found it hard to get started with the subject matter of Art Supplies. Of course, they are the materials and products used to create an art journal page, but there is also something that the artist brings, so for my Art Supply list I included:

1. Inspiration that sparks your imagination to create the page in the first place.

2. Materials used for art journalling.

3. Creativity by being open-minded, experimenting and trying new things.

4. Bravery, especially when things go wrong. I’ve learnt that my pages are never perfect and I often have “happy accidents” and that's ok (smile!).

Inspiration also came from an old magazine image of a lady in a yoga pose holding art supplies (such a happy coincidence – yay!); it features as part of my design because art journalling is my happy place helping me to relax and find balance. This image then influenced the colour palette for my page.

To create my page, I covered the background using Villainous Potion and Salvage Patina Distress Paints and some Pébéo white gesso and then I used a brayer to disperse the paint colours. I splattered Distress paints over the top and left it to dry. The central image was fussy cut from an old magazine and I die cut the scalloped circle from some paper scraps and like all the paper pieces were stuck in place using Liquitex matte gel medium. The gold lettering was die cut from some gold foiled cardstock using an Alphanumeric Script Sizzix Thinlits set by Tim Holtz. Once arranged on the page, I added shadows using a Violet Derwent Inktense pencil and a gold Uniball gel pen to make them stand out more. I arranged lots of motivational wording, which were from a Small Talk sticker book by Tim Holtz, in a sunburst pattern around the central image and I edged them with the gold gel pen. Then to finish, I splattered the whole page with black DecoArt acrylic paint.

Thank you Jo for sharing your beautiful journal page with us. We really loved seeing your take on the challenge this month.  

 We hope Jo's fantastic take on our challenge theme inspires you to enter the June challenge!

Here's a reminder of our current Challenge:

Don't forget that you can find all of our challenge details and extra information, as well as Jo's published interview in our magazine Artful Pages.  Enter the challenge on the blog, Instagram or our Facebook group.  All links are on the sidebar!