Mail comes in.....mail goes out.....

.... and thus is the balance of the world restored :)

First of all - mail came in

You might remember, a few months ago, my Rock CJ came home - the one with all the little record sleeve makeovers.

When I blogged it back then, I had a couple of spare record sleeves left over, and asked if anyone out in blogland fancied doing me a favour and completing my CJ for me.  And Donna and Bex (fellow Collabor-ARTists both) were kind enough to volunteer.

And here are the fantastic results!

Donna chose Kraftwerk's The Model for her makeover:

And Bex went with Faith no More's brilliant Angel Dust, one of my favourite albums of all time - love the screaming Mike P on the front :)

I LOVE them both, thank you ladies!!

And then some mail art went out

The first one, coincidentally, was for Donna - yes that Donna up there :)

I happen to know that her mis-spent youth was very similar to my own, and that she shares a love both for the punk rock sensibility, and for those crazy old anarcho-space-rockers Hawkwind.  So I chose the most punk rock song Hawkwind ever wrote as the basis for my mail art offering.

First of all I got my Banksy on with some spray paint and a hand cut stencil:

And this is the end result:

I realised once it was finished that the song lyrics I included on the card ("I'm an urban guerrilla, I make bombs in my cellar"....etc....) could possibly be taken the wrong way lol

So I wrote a little note on the back to the postman assuring him that it was just a song and there really was no need to alert the authorities ;)

And it must have worked as the postcard arrived at Donna's safe and sound the next day

The eye in the pyramid on the back is another logo used by Hawkwind along the way, and was drawn using Posca paint pens

And the faux postage stamp is one from this sheet, still going strong

Next up, a postcard for my good friend Virginia

It started off like this (gelli-plate background onto corrugated cardboard - I love the how the texture shows through - and drawings on top with Posca paint pens) - can you tell what it is yet?? :D

How about now?

Yes, it's a zombie bunny - or will be when it's finished.  This subject matter is a bit of an in joke for Virginia harking back to a previous conversation.  I hope she remembered the conversation as otherwise she probably thinks I'm a little peculiar right now! :)

And here he is all done and ready to pop in the post:

cute isn't he .... in an undead kinda way :)

(finished off with a combination of Fresco chalk paints and oil pastels - bunny adapted from a digital illustration by Patione)

Rock hands for the Queen of the Rockettes :)

Virginia expressed some surprise that the postcard had travelled through the mail unhindered given the Biohazard stamp - but that's nothing compared to Donna's bomb threats :D

My Rock CJ came home - yay!

A long, long time ago, I sent a little box of blank 'record covers' out into the world, and now they've come home - thank you so much to everyone who was a part of this!

The brief for this particular circle journal was for each participant to choose a rock album that they rated in terms of the music, but weren't so keen on the cover art - and to design a new cover for it.

So, without further ado, here are all the entries (with their originals underneath):

One thing I have noticed is that pretty much all of us took a fairly literal approach, where the originals were more abstract.  Well apart from Sian, who went from a VERY literal original and took us, thankfully, a step away from squishy spaghetti :)

I love all the re-imagined covers, now we just have to persuade the record companies to buy the artwork from us and repackage those albums :D

Before I go, I have a favour to ask...... unfortunately a couple of people had to drop out of this CJ as it did its rounds, so I still have two blank records left over:

I would REALLY like to see them get used so that I can add a couple more masterpieces to the box.

So if any of you out there reading this have thought - oh that looks like a fun theme - I'd like to have a go at that - then please let me know by email or in the comments below, I'd really appreciate it.

Rock CJ - I'm all done and dusted

Last November, this was my contribution to for Clare's "colours" journal in the Rock CJ - I chose the colour vermillion and my entry was based on the Slipknot song of the same name

Sadly, not long after that, one of our participants went AWOL, taking Clare's book with her :(  So, in order to finish off my commitments to this CJ as a whole, I needed to re-create my entry

I still have some small hope that the original book might one day re-surface, however, so I didn't want to simply copy what I did before. In fact I didn't even stick to the colour red, this time I chose orange.

Or, to be more specific, tangerine - for the Led Zeppelin song of the same name.

I did keep the same basic shape though, as I like the way it folds up.

Above is how it looks closed, with the 4 famous symbols representing the members of Led Zep

And here it is opened up:

The patchwork style background is watercoloured, the picture (I used a photo of Florence from Florence and the Machine as her almost medieval look suits the lyrics of the song well, I think) is an image transfer, and the writing around the edge was done using Posca paint pens

The back all opened up with my sign in in the middle:

And the matching "spine" part:

And that's it, I'm all done!

It's been fun ladies!  (apart from the one book going walkies of course)

Round 3 another time maybe???

Seems like ages since I last did a Circle Journal entry....

... and it certainly makes a nice change from Index Cards :)

This is my entry in Liz's Rock CJ - her theme was "your ultimate feel-good rock song" or the song that makes you feel like a total bad ass

Now, I'm not convinced I ever get particularly bad ass, but I can do the feel-good bit :)

There is one song on earth that is guaranteed to make me sing along and smile, and that's Tribute by Tenacious D.  Connor has it on his phone ready to play to me if I'm ever in a sad or bad mood, works like a charm every single time :)

And it's the "we are but men, ROCK!!!" bit that really works the magic

So that's what I went with:

Liz's book is a kiddies board book, which was fun to work in, but that did mean that all our entries had to be pretty flat, no embellishments, and in addition she asked for us to draw/paint our own entries as much as possible

So instead of collaging in Mr Grohl as the Devil, I drew him and coloured him in with watercolours.

It was tough!! and I don't think the result looks much like him :)  But I'm still pleased I gave it a go.  I hope Liz likes it.

This almost concludes my participation in this CJ - but I have one entry to re-do, as Clare's colours journal (the one I did this for)  has sadly gone walkies.... I think I'll pick a different colour this time around rather than just reproduce what I did before .  After that, I'm all done and dusted.

Celebrating the Demon of Screamin'

Here's my latest Rock CJ entry - in Karen's journal which is dedicated to Steven Tyler from Aerosmith

I decided to illustrate some of Mr T's quotes, some of which are pretty funny.

I was going to use a photo of him with his mouth open on the speech bubble, but instead found this fantastic caricature on DeviantArt - hopefully the artist won't mind me using it given that this is just a non commercial project between friends

The right hand side part of the speech bubble is a page in its own right, and that turns over to reveal the quotes underneath:

I typed the quotes on my trusty new toy, Erika.  Who I haven't blogged about yet, have I?  I'd better do my very overdue Rockin' My world Friday post tomorrow!

You might want to click on this pic to enlarge it so you can read  the quotes...they are worth it....especially the one about the duck :)

And that's about it for the layout itself.

The last thing we had to do was make a little laminated "tour pass" to match our layout.... here's mine:

And that's another CJ done.... see you again next month .....


PS, I've just had an email asking about the background paper I used for these pages.  Here is how it looked before I stuck everything down:

It is primarily spray paints (with some normal acrylic paint in the mix too) through various stencils onto an A3  sheet of textured watercolour paper.  These backgrounds take no time at all to whip up but they add a lot of texture and depth to your page.

Waxing lyrical....

It's R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rock CJ time again!

This is Sian's journal - and it's all about song lyrics - always a great subject to work with

The brief was simply to choose a rawk song or two whose lyrics are particularly meaningful to me, and, well, art 'em up!

I couldn't just choose the one, as yet again it would be Pearl Jam and I've already bored everyone's socks off in this circle with PJ stuff - and once I expanded the scope to two songs, it was hard to stop - so I ended up with four:

Swing Life Away by Rise Against

I'll show you mine if you show me yours first
Let's compare scars, I'll tell you whose is worst
Let's unwrite these pages and replace them with our own words

Back when I was fresh out of a pretty awful marriage followed by another less than successful relationship, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.  Like you do.

And I used to listen to this song a lot and dream a little dream about meeting some guy who was just as messed up as me and how we would kind of heal each other....or something :)

Instead I met a wonderful man who is totally sane and not messed up in the slightest - and it turns out that is an even better plan! :D

But I still love the song :)

Present Tense by Pearl Jam


You can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets
Or you can come to terms and realise, you're the only one who can't forgive yourself
Makes much more sense, to live in the present tense

This one had to be in the mix somewhere - after all if a song's lyrics mean so much to you that you get them tattooed on your leg, then the chances are they are pretty important!

I already mentioned the god awful marriage, didn't I?

Well that lasted 12 years - at least 8 of which, maybe more, I shouldn't have put up with.

For a long time I beat myself up for not getting out sooner, and all the crap that my two sons (now grown up) ended up living through - and all the crap that I lived through too

This song literally changed my life as it made me snap the hell out of it and start living my life for the now instead of obsessing about how rubbish the past was

Thank you PJ!

In Relief by John Frusciante

When your leader's gone, he means to make you strong, he never went away.  Because what you need, you are. 

I'm not overly keen on the handwriting on this one, I wanted to write all the lyrics by hand because it's more personal and all - but this one turned out a bit of a mess.  Ah well.

This is an amazing song, and it helped me through some difficult times - when you feel like you're on your own, don't panic, be strong - you have it in you to get through this.

Grind by Alice In Chains

You'd be well advised, not to plan my funeral before the body dies....

This last little snippet is something I mutter under my breath sometimes .... I'm a bit of a soft touch, and people take advantage of that from time to time - but those who really take the piss tend to find out too late that they under-estimated me.

(*evil cackle*)

Don't write me off as harmless, people, not until the body dies.....

(ok, now you all think I'm a psycho, I'm nice really, honest!)

The face inside is right beneath your skin...

Another day, another dollar - or in my case, another week, another CJ

This is my entry in Virginia's journal - which is all about Linkin Park

The pages are folded, so this (above) is what mine looks like closed

And here it is open :

I've gone with the song "Paper Cut" - and as that's about paranoia I had this idea of making Chester's eyes kind of pop out of his head to suggest eyes darting all over the place looking out for the bad guys, that kind of thing.

Not convinced it worked but never mind :) 

The flash is really bouncing off the metallic sprays and inks on that photo above, this close up gives a truer idea of what the background looks like:

So, yes, that's the main entry in the book.

Virginia also asked us to share our recommendations for new music.

Trouble is, I mainly listen to stuff that was recorded 20 years ago :)  So this bit was a bit tricky!

I ended up sharing bands that aren't necessarily new (Polar Bear Club are, not so much the others), but who have released GOOD material recently. In other words they're not just sitting on their laurels living off past glories.  Like some bands I could mention.

Sorry, the flash has rendered that one pretty much illegible.  I really ought to take my photos in the daytime!  (trouble is, I'm at work in the daytime)

and then last but not least, we were asked to make a sign in page, featuring a logo or symbol that represents us or is important to us.  How could I choose anything other than my orca?

So that's it for this month.  I have Sian's song lyrics themed journal next time around, looking forward to that one.