Joggles Art Journal Adventure ~ Week 7 (Love/Hate)

Hi everyone. It's my turn to choose the prompt for the Joggles Art Journal Adventure Week 7 and since we are approaching Valentine's Day, the prompt I've chosen is Love/Hate. I want you to feature something that you absolutely love or something that gets on your last nerve...or both! Have fun with it! There were so many directions I could have taken this but I settled on coffee (yum!) and cats who are some of my favourite companions.

I like to play with junk journals so I usually have a pile of coffee dyed paper on hand. It seemed like the ideal background for my double page spread (each page is 4 x 6 inches so 8 x 6 in total). I punched the holes in  the top and bottom of the 8.5 x 11 inch paper to line up with the ones in the disc-bound journal paper and then adhered one half to each page. That allowed me a little room to play and match up the holes, after which I trimmed away the excess. I love how distressed and aged the coffee dyed paper looks. I added some detail to the backgrounds using Coffee Archival Ink and a Stamper's Anonymous Coffee Rings stamp as well as Joggles Nonsense Latin Text and Circles stamps. I also used the same ink around the edges of both pages.

I wanted to feature a hand cut mug of coffee and the cats from the Laurel Burch stamp called Indigo Cats which I stamped using Jet Black Archival Ink onto scraps of mop-up paper used to soak up leftover ink. I wanted bright and also variety of colour, intensity, and pattern within each cat so this worked perfectly. Inktense pencils activated with a waterbrush were used to shade the cats and the cup. Black Pitt pen was used to colour in the black and white Sharpie Paint Pen for the eyes and doodles. These images were then fussy cut, adhered to black cardstock, and fussy cut again leaving a narrow black border. The cup was further embellished with the same Nonsense Latin Text stamp used on the background but this time I used Vermillion Archival ink. A heart cut from old book paper was inked with Coffee Archival and matted with black to adhere to the center of the cup. They were then popped up with foam tape.

Before adhering the images to the background, a length of washi tape was added to white cardstock, fussy cut, and adhered to the bottom of each page to give the cats and cup somewhere to stand. A black doodled border was added to the outside edges of both pages to serve as a bit of a frame. The sentiment was printed onto white cardstock and cut into individual words which were then matted with black. Foam tape was used to adhere the words to the pages. The hearts were punched from the same mop-up paper used for the cats. They were outlined with black  Big Brush Pen and highlighted with white paint pen. Foam tape was used on the two in the sentiment and the others were adhered flat.

I love how this spread turned out...the palette, those fabulous cats, and all the coffee references. I had a lot of fun creating this page which has been my goal for this year's pages. I want to create pages that make me smile both the entire time I'm creating them and then with the finished spread. If you haven't checked out the 2018 Joggles Art Journal Adventure Facebook group, take a minute to pop over (click on the link). We have a lovely and talented community of wonderful people there and inspiration galore. It's a great place to hang out. This Love/Hate prompt could be the ideal place to join in :)

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie