Trying Out New Creative Hobbies

A while back, in my '2017 Blogging Resolutions' post (click here to read) I said that I wanted to introduce a few new topics such as bullet journalling and calligraphy. As of yet, I haven't posted about these topics yet. That's why today I wanted to show you three new creative hobbies that I have tried out recently: calligraphy, scrapbooking and bullet journalling.

#1:Calligraphy: Recently I've been trying out my Winsor and Newton calligraphy set that I got for Christmas. I've only had a few little goes at it so far but I've enjoyed trying out the little tutorial for a simple font. Here you can see my attempt at writing a phrase. The first time round didn't go so well because as you can see, the capital letters and lower case letters aren't in proportion to one another. I was practising for a title in my school art sketchbook. That's one of the main reasons why I asked for a calligraphy set for Christmas, so I could create interesting titles for my sketchbook. I'll have to practise a lot more to become skilled at calligraphy, but I'm already enjoying experimenting with all the inks.

 #2:Scrapbooking: I have a lot of cute crafting supplies so I thought I'd try out scrapbooking so I can use some of my supplies. Here's the first page in my scrapbook, it's an Easter page so I used lots of pastels and Spring animals to decorate the pages. I'm really looking forward to decorating more pages because it will mean that I'll have to take more photos of everything I've been up to. I think that will be great for me since normally I only take photos for this blog, but with a scrapbook I'll try to keep memories with my photos. 

#3:Bullet Journalling: I've been seeing lots of bullet journalling on pinterest and YouTube over the past year so I thought I'd give it a go myself. I asked for a dotted moleskine notebook for Christmas so I've been using this lovely notebook to start my own bullet journal. I've not been doing daily or weekly spreads, only a monthly tracker and a few other random pages (e.g. books to read). I've only done simple designs so far to see what it's like to be a bullet journaller. It may look like I've not done well at the goals I've set myself, since there's lots of blank spaces but I'm actually happy with what I've achieved. These aren't necessarily goals that I have to do every day, I just want to see how often I do things like colour or practise calligraphy so I can decide whether I should do it more often or not. I keep a bullet journal to motivate me to do creative things regularly and it seems to be working for me. I think it's something I'll improve on over time as well. By the way I haven't fully filled in everything yet and some rows don't even have a goal on since I ran out of ideas hehe.

I hope you've enjoyed today's quick post. I'll be writing about these topics again once I've practised a few more times and have some more creative things to show you.

Over to you...
Have you ever tried out these hobbies? Let me know about your experience in the comments! Also, have you been trying any other new things recently? 

Creative Guide to Gift Giving

Hello everyone! Sorry that it's been more than two weeks since I last posted but I'm back with something a little different. Today I wanted to share with you something that I enjoy doing every now and then, being creative with gift giving. There have been several friends that have had birthdays in the last two months so I have lots of ideas for you.

This first set of gifts has a bit of a theme. I tried to use lots of pastel colours and a few metallics so the gifts would tie in well together. I handmade some bookmarks that looked like some of my friend's favourite cartoon characters. One of my tips for gift giving is to make some gifts yourself. This means that you can really personalise the gifts and it's fun to see what you can create.

This next set of gifts doesn't really have a theme but there's a few fun gifts here. My next tip for gift giving is to ask a few questions to the person you're giving gifts to. A few weeks before their birthdays, I asked my friends a few things about what their favourite things are. Things like their: favourite sweets, favourite TV shows/programs, favourite accessories and things that they can't get enough of/collect. This helped to inspire me with possible themes or just the sort of gifts they might like. In the jewellery box in the photo, are some handmade earrings. This friend told me they liked Harry Potter and Stranger Things and their favourite accessories were earrings. So I made waffle stud earrings (apparently waffles are a Stranger Things reference) and golden snitch inspired dangly earrings (a Harry Potter reference).

Again, this next set of gifts doesn't have a theme but I used the questions about their favourite things to come up with these gifts. My next tip for gift giving is to try to give different types of presents. What I mean by this is you should try not to give just food or just jewellery or just stationery, etc but instead to give a mix of all of these things. The reason I say this is because everything lasts for different amount of times. Food lasts for a very short amount of time, depending on how tasty it is tee-hee. Stationery lasts for much longer but can eventually be used up. Then jewellery could last for a very long time. BY the way the handmade items here are: the notebook, the bookmarks and the earrings inside the jewellery box. 

 This final set of gifts does have a theme, jaffa cakes. It's a bit of an unusual theme but fun. That's why my last tip is to think outside of the box. Just think, who else is going to give these gifts? I don't think anyone else would (that could either be a good or bad thing, you decide hehe). I used two of the things that they said were their favourite things: jaffa cakes and bath bombs, to inspire me. This was actually quite difficult to put together because there weren't many jaffa cake items in the shops. So I actually bought chocolate orange items from the shops:chocolate orange bath bomb and chocolate orange lollipops. I made the notebook myself and the keyring was handmade too, but not by me. It was made by Heartfelty (see their facebook page here).

I hope that I've inspired you to get creative with your gift giving, it's such a fun thing to do for your friends and family! Just to recap, here's my four tips for creative giftgiving:

1. Hand make some gifts-this can really personalise the gifts
2. Ask the recipient a few questions about their favourite things-again this helps you to personalise their gifts
3. Try to give a few different types of gifts-this means the recipient can enjoy their gifts in different ways for different amounts of time
4. Think outside the box-this makes the gifts fun and unique

So that's all for today's post, remember you don't have to spend a lot of money to give gifts that your friends will enjoy, I just thought I'd share a few creative ideas to inspire you.

Over to you..

Have you given any gifts recently? Or have you been doing anything else creative? Let me know in the comments. Also, what has been your best gift you've ever received?

Starting a New Art Project-Part 3

Hello everyone! Today, I'm here with the final part of 'Starting A New Art Project'! This time, I'll be talking about the backgrounds that I create to start of the pages in my project. I enjoy creating backgrounds because it's fun to just let loose on a blank piece of paper and get creative with materials! Some people don't create backgrounds for their school art projects, so don't feel like you have to. I just enjoy doing it and think that it pulls together the project nicely. To get better marks in your GCSE Art project, it's probably best to focus on the quality of your own drawings and photos, rather than the backgrounds but I still like to make them. Anyway, I'll get on with showing you examples of my backgrounds!

 This background is the first one that I created for my 'Personal Collection' project. It's the background for my title page so I wanted it to be really special. I created it using a decoupage technique (ripping small squares out of paper and layering them with PVA glue) with newspaper. I chose this technique because I thought the words in the newspaper reflected the theme of stationery. Once the newspaper had dried, I used a sponge to put on the three primary colours:red,blue and yellow. I also added some whiet over the top of some areas to brighten it up. I like the textured look I have created.

This second background was created for the moodboard. You can see part of the title there that I created with glitter, it didn't exactly go to plan. However, I'm quite happy with the background. I used a water blotting technique with primary colours: red, blue and yellow. I have tried to do several backgrounds in the primary colours, to tie the project together. If you don't know 'water blotting' is where you first put water on your page, then you put paint over the top and it spreads out.

This background is for the own photos page. I created it with a sponge, acrylic paint in primary colours, white acrylic paint, alphabet stamps and black ink. I like the distressed look I have created with the black ink edging that I have created and the white paint that dulled down the colour. The letters tie in with the stationery theme again like the newspaper writing did.

This one was for an artist page about Andrea Joseph. This didn't tie in with the primary colour thing that I have mainly been using because the artist pages seem quite separate from the rest of the project, because the rest of the project is my own idea whereas these pages are someone else's ideas. I hope that made sense hehe! Anyway, the main background was lined paper but this is the border. I created it with map paper, bubble wrap and acrylic paint. The acrylic paint was put on the bubblewrap which acted like a stamp. I like using bubblewrap because it creates an interesting texture.

 This next background was for the artist response page, which is where you draw from your own photos but in the style of the artist you are studying (Andrea Joseph in this case). I went back to the primary colours since this is my own work this time. I used the lined paper to represent a notebook. which the artist seems to use a lot for her artwork. The border was created with bubble wrap and acrylic paint in the primary colours and white.

 This final background was for the artist response evaluation. I used scrapbook paper, a colouring book page and white acrylic paint. I ripped up the two papers and layered them on the paper with PVA glue. I then used a sponge with white acrylic paint to dull down the colours in the papers. I didn't want the black lines and pink pattern to stand out too much since this is just a background.

So that's it! The next time I post it will be a different topic since this was the final 'Starting a New Art Project' post. Once I've finished the project completely (24th April) I'll probably show you all of the pages in full. But for now, I'll be writing new content! I hope you're looking forward to the next time that I post, I've been keeping a list of blog post ideas that are either new topics or bringing back old ones!

PS: Do you like the new Spring background? I drew all of the elements this time: the tulips and the blossom. I put it together on PicMonkey.

Over to you...
Do you enjoy creating backgrounds for creative projects such as your sketchbook or creative journal? Or do you enjoy making collages? Also, what topics do you want to see on my blog in the upcoming months?

Starting a New Art Project-Part 2

Hello everyone! Sorry for not posting for such a long time! I've missed blogging so I thought i'd try to quickly write a a post. I'l try my best to keep regularly posting now but I tend to get quite busy at the moment! Anyway, I'm back with a second part to 'Starting a New Art Project'-it's not really new anymore but I'll stick with the title he-he! 

So, in this post I'll be showing you a few of my drawings that I've done in my 'Personal Collection-stationery and craft supplies' project so far. At this point in my project, I've now done a double page spread of observational drawings based on the photos I showed you last week. It took me a long time but I love looking back at my project at this stage to see the progress I've made!

 This first drawing is of some mini pencils that I createdwith my Prismacolor pencils. I wish that I'd just left a gap on the paper for the white stripe since it took a long time to create a white light strip after I'd coloured it in already! Oh well- I'm quite happy with this drawing since I like that the light as added a realistic look to the drawing rather than just cartoon-y.

 These next drawings are quite small so I found it quite difficult to add details. I used acrylic paint which I find quite hard to control sometimes (since I haven' had much experience with it). However, I don'y think these turned out as badly as I had expected them to. They're quite cute ad I like the texture on these.

This is one of my favourite drawings on the double page spread so that's why I decided to give it its own photo (I haven't zoomed in all of the drawings). I created this with black fineliner and it was a lot of fun to give ink another go! I haven't used ink since Inktober really (last October) so I was glad to see that I remembered how to control the pen! In real life, these eiffel tower scissors are a rose gold colour but I made it simpler for myself by keeping it black and white for this drawing. The lineart itself was very detailed so it took a long time but I love the overall effect!

These next photos are both the same drawing of a purse that I keep my mini pencils in, the purse was a gift from Japan. This is my favourite drawing (with the eiffel tower scissors being in a close second) and it's a good job that I love it since it took me hours! Actually, I wasn't really counting in hours, I was counting in TV programmes and films that I watched in the background whilst drawing it! But when I calculated the length of the programmes together, it seems that I took about 3 and a half hours on this! Oops! You can see that I created the texture of fabric on the purse in the photo on the right.

Here's the completed double page spread, the lighting in the photo is a little iffy but hopefully you can see all the drawings clearly! I wanted to create an interesting layout and add collage-like features such as sequins, stamps, buttons and pencil sharpenings. There are a few drawings that I'm not keen on such as the stamps and the panda sharpener but overall I'm proud of the results of this page.

That's all for this post! I hope you've enjoyed nosey-ing at my sketchbook, like I said in my last post I like to do that too! I think I'll only do one more of these 'Starting a New Art Project' since I don't want to be stuck in one blog series-I want to try new topics like bullet journalling and calligraphy and just experiment really this year.

Over to you...
What do you think of my observational drawings? Have you been doing an art project recently either at school or at home? Let me know in the comments!

Starting a New Art Project-Part 1

Hello everyone! This year I started my GCSE Art course and I've been loving getting creative! So, this week I decided to share with you my experience of starting a brand new art project. I'm one of those people who love nosy-ing at people's GCSE sketchbooks so I hope you're one of those people too! I think I'll do a few posts about my art project so make sure you come back to read the rest! This first post is about my own photos (AKA primary sources).

To start our project we were given a list of topics such as: stretched, personal collection, public transport, details, assembled, architecture and wrap. We could interpret these any way we would like to personalise our project. I knew straight away that I wanted to do 'personal collection' because my room is practically overflowing with stationery I've collected ha-ha! So my sub-theme was stationery and craft supplies. From this point we were given a list of tasks to do and since I only started this 1-2 weeks ago I've only made a start on the first few.

Here's where I get back to where I started...photography! Over the weekend I used my spare time to take photos for my project! I gathered up all of my prettiest stationery and prepared a few backgrounds then just got started!
                                                   

 Left:
I used a Johanna Basford colouring book page as the background for this because I wanted to create a soft look to the photo. Also, I continued this soft look in the editing stage by turning the temperature up to make it look cosy. I also used an effect that darkened the edges and brightened the centre which \I thought added to the cosy feel. By the way, I used PicMonkey to edit all of these photos and just used my smartphone's camera. Also, it took me AGES to link those papercliups together in the shape of 'hello' ha-ha!

Right:
This one fits more into the crafting supplies section of my project because I used sequins. I spelled out 'love' with sticky notes. I liked how this tied in with the upcoming Valentines Day celebrations.

Left: 
I decided to use hessian fabric as my background for this one to create added interest with some texture. It should be interesting to come up with a way to recreate that background in my sketchbook! I used my moleskine dotted notebook and some mini pencils for this because I thought these items were really cute! The purse is there because that's where I store the pencils and I think it will be good to get a break from drawing stationery. By the way this purse is from Japan.

Right:
This one doesn't have such an interesting layout as the others but I wanted to focus on the sequins. I chose to take photos of sequins because I think that it will be interesting to look at the colours on them and then try to recreate them with different mediums.

Left:
This one took me a very long time to arrange ha-ha! I started this early in the morning on Sunday so that it would be done by 12 o'clock when the lighting was just right! For some reason I love incorporating circles into my art projects, they just seem to look neat but not too harsh. Do you understand what I mean? Anyway, I like this layout.#

Right:
Well...this one didn't exactly go to plan. It was meant to look a little bit like the one on the left but less organised. I started by putting the ones that were in the middle (red) at the bottom of a toilet paper tube and then put the next layer above it and so on. Then when all of the buttons were in, I lifted up the tube and let the buttons spread out. As you can see, it's messier than I was hoping for! Anyway, I think that the contrast between the photos will be an interesting part of my project.

Left:
I took this photo in a slightly different way to the previous photos. All the others are flatlays (taken from above) but this one was taken in front of the items against a background. I like that this one has a mixture of plain white paper and hessian as the background because it ahs a nice balance of textures. I chose some really cute pieces of stationery here. In editing, I darkened the edges to bring attention to the items.

Right:
For this photo I chose the wooden table as the background because I wanted something warmer than plain white paper but I wanted to choose something different than hessian.I like that I chose the eiffel tower scissors with the eiffel tower writing paper because they work well together! I love this writing set by the way, it's so gorgeous! It's from Paperchase (but the sharpie, scissors and stamps aren't).

So that's all for this post! I hope that you've been inspired by my photos, I'll be taking a few more for the project but these are the ones that I wanted to share with you! I don't know how often I'll update you on my new art project but it may not be every time I post since sometimes I'll feel like posting something else.

Over to you...
Are you currently doing a GCSE art project or have you done in the past? Let me know in the comments. Also, what do you think about my photos?

Giveaway Time! (CLOSED)

Hello everyone! I hope 2017 is treating you all marvellously! I was originally going to call this post 'New Year's Giveaway' but since it's the 16th of January I wasn't sure if I should still refer to the year as 'new'. Anyway, this is sort of a giveaway to celebrate the new year! It is a free entry into this competition since it's just a bit of fun!

So, the last time I did a giveaway, I only opened it to my UK readers. But this year I've decided to open it internationally because I know that a few of my reader are from around the world which is so exciting! Also, another reason that I decided to open the giveaway internationally is because in recent months I have seen an increase in views so I wanted to cater for those views from around the world!

This is just a small giveaway but I wanted to giveaway two items that I thought my creative readers would love! The first item is a pack of 10 plain cards that you can decorate for any occasion! They are 380gsm so are good quality and they are 6" by 6". They come with envelopes too by the way. The next item which is the main one is a colouring book called: 'Colour Yourself Advent Christmas Countdown' and was illustrated by Hearfelt Illustrations (click on this link for her facebook page). I know that Christmas is over but I wanted to give one of these away so that you could look at my colouring of it in my post (click here)  and then give it a go yourslef! In fact, both of these prizes are inspired by my past posts, I wanted to give you this pack of plain cards so that you could be inspired by cardmaking post (click here). I thought by giving you prizes inspired by posts it would mean a little bit more than if I just gave you random items ha-ha! Look at the prizes below...

So what are the rules?

Well,they're pretty simple! Please follow all the rules:

1.) To enter, just comment below telling me why you'd like to win

2.) Ask your parents if you can enter if you're under 18 because if you win you'll need to tell me your address (we can arrange this over e-mail)

3.) Enter by the deadline: 20th February

Extra Info

• There will be one winner who wins both prizes
• I may include a pretty letter with your prizes 

So that's all! Good luck to everyone! I hope you're happy about the giveaway, January can be a dreary month for some so I wanted to brighten it up a bit!

PS: I hope you like the new background, it's a Winter one that I created on PicMonkey

Over to you...
You know what you've got to do now, if you're ready to enter, just leave a comment saying why you want to win!

EDIT:Thanks to everyone who entered or left a comment but now the contest is closed and a winner has been chosen, I've replied to their comment in the comment section so please check your replies! 

2017 Blogging Resolutions

Happy new year! For my first blog post of 2017, I thought I would tell you a few of the changes I hope to make to my blog in this coming year. I'm only making a few small changes, I think you'll still enjoy reading my blog if you've been reading for a while. I'm excited to introduce a few new ideas and see where my blog takes me in this new year! I think that my blog really grew last year as because I tried out a few new topics such as penpalling and colouring that I have become very passionate about recently. I hope that my blog improves even more this year and I continue to try out new ideas.

The first change that I decided to make this year is a change in my schedule. I've decided to aim to post about once every 2 weeks rather than once per week. I've found that I tend to post once every 2 weeks anyway so I thought that I'd announce it as an actual change. It's quite hard for me to fit in blogging with school and I'll be getting more schoolwork in these next two years so I wanted a bit more time to write posts. I don't think you'll notice much of a change anyway since I didn't really stick to the once a week schedule anyway.

I have done one blog collaboration in the past and really enjoyed it so I thought that this year I would take part in a few more collabs. Last year I started to work on a Disney fanart collab with 5starartists.blogspot.co.uk which I'll be able to continue this year now that I have finished the colouring challenge. Also, I hope to start some more blog collabs with my blogging friends that we've been talking about for quite a while. A project that I was working on last year was guest blogging for Cathy Cassidy's blog which I hoep to carry on with this year.

I'm really excited for my next change in this list! In the upcoming months, I'll be introducing some new topics that you've never seen me write about before! For Christmas I asked for a bullet journal and bullet journal so I was given both of these. I've never tried out calligraphy or bullet journalling but I'm really looking forward to trying them out. I want to share my experience with you so you can see what it's like so you might want to take up the hobbies yourself! I think learning new skills is a great new year's resolution so I hope to inspire readers.

I feel that in the previous year I haven't done much fashion designing at all. I feel like this is a big shame since it is something that I'm very passionate about, in fact I have always thought that fashion design is a career that I want to get into in the future. There's still lots for me to learn so that's why I want to get back to this topic on my blog. I think that having a blog motivates me to try creative things so I'm hoping that now I have said that I want to write about fashion design, I actually will DO fashion designing. I created a fashion sketchbook that I want to use.

The final change is one that is the most difficult to achieve. I will try my best to make at least a little progress on this during 2017 but I can't promise anything. The reason that I am unsure about this goal is because I will be getting more schoolwork in the next two years. This means that I will be more busy. However, I setup a YouTube channel last year that I want to upload more videos on. I don't think that I will use a schedule yet but I do want to be a bit more active. I have filmed a few videos but they're not edited yet and are quite old. so fingers crossed that I will have time for YouTube but I may not.

So those are the five changes that I aim to make in 2017! I hope that you're happy with the changes I want to make, I don't think there are any dramatic changes so you don't have to worry that my blog is going to transform into a completely different creature. I'm sticking with creative topics as I always have done and I'm excited to see the blog evolve to fit my newest hobbies as well as my original ones! Happy new year everyone!

Over to you...
What are your new year's resolutions? I have quite a few that I'll be tracking in my bullet journal. Also, are there any blog posts that you'd like to see in the new year that fit with the creative topics that I already write about/plan to write about? Let me know in the comments.

PS: I'll make a new blog background very soon but you'll have to look at the Christmas one for a little while longer ha-ha!