More printing and even more blackberries ...

In between binge-reading chapters of 'Career of Evil' (very creepy, but excellent) and pulling up bindweed on the allotment I collected yet more blackberries and came home to cram them into an already full-to-bursting freezer.  I also couldn't resist experimenting with Gelli printing again.  I really need to give it a rest for a while as I'm going to be drowning under a sea of painted paper soon!  But I have been using several of the sheets to make booklets that I can use as either notebooks or art journals, so at least I can find a practical use for some of 'em.  I was really pleased with this blue, green, purple and silver printed paper.  Looks really pretty, and I included metallic paint so it's got a nice sheen when it catches the light.  Rather less pleased with this piece based on a yellowy-creamy background.  

The colours are a bit all over the place, but it's not a total disaster.  I do love that bubbles stencil from Hobbycraft.  (Bubbles or dots, I forget what its proper title is.)  As well as liking the stencil I bought from the charity shop, which kind of looks like a chrysanthemum flower, or maybe someone else would see it as a starburst?  

These are the latest art journal pages I did, and I like the bold contrast with the black dots and the orangey-red background.  Looking back on my initial attempts at art journallng, I now think I was relying too much on techniques I'd seen others do on videos.  I was not exactly copying them, but was trying to produce something that was more their style than mine.  These pages are more 'me', even though they're quite simple in the way they're constructed.  No added text or lettering.  No stencils or masks layered on top of the cut-up-and-pasted printed papers.  I think that because I wasn't sure, at first, what the rules are with art journaling, what you should do, how your journal should look to be considered successful, I wasn't confident enough.  Also, I was trying to produce something that looked artistic.  Trying to produce a completed image that someone else might view and approve of.  But I need to be bold enough to have pages that look messy sometimes, or weird or odd or ugly or whatever.  I reckon I should concentrate on the idea that the journal's a 'safe space'.  Nothing in it needs to be pretty-pretty or accomplished, and nothing needs to be shown to anyone else unless I chose to share it.