Fauxdori Sketchbook - Progress so far

You may remember at the end of August that I decided to buy a purple leather Fauxdori notebook made by Ray Blake.

After much looking at it and then work getting in the way, I have sort of finally made a start on it.

So here is a Fauxdori Flip-through to see what I have done so far.

I started by covering the notebook supplied with a Zentagle design using a white paint pen.  I have yet to do the back cover, I shall save that for a rainy day.

I have not put anything on the first page because I am not sure what to add here.

Now, this may not seem very interesting but I decided to try out all of my paints etc to see what they looked like on the page.  I have never actually done this before so I quite enjoyed this!

Just a little sample and I like how it crinkles the page.

I have bought some notebooks with thick paper so with this book I thought I would simply do what i felt like, with no plan, just doodling and drawing what i felt like.  So the above is linked to the hydrangea plants in my garden with water colours and pen.

My beloved Poppy Seed heads which I shall be coming back to again.

I love these fabric houses and I would like to make one.  May be over the Christmas holidays perhaps. Anyway I made a mini moodboard with my favourite pictures.

I liked them so much that I drew my own.

Yes, I really must have a go at a little fabric house.  I wonder if my textiles group would also be interested.

Having just made some ATC's on the theme of postage stamps, I thought that I would make a journal page on the same theme.  I used some Clear Gesso and I have to say that i am not that impressed.  Unless I have done something wrong I found it very gritty and not nice to the touch at all.  I shall keep with it and see what else I can do with it.

I keep adding stamps as things arrive in the post.

I also wanted to note some areas that are covered in my new printing evening class so I decided to use a real Midori Notebook for this one with brown paper.

The paper is quite thin which I did not think I would like, but I do.

I took miniature pictures of our first session of Dry point printing and added those with some basic notes.  The printing that we did went well with the brown paper.

These are created by scratching on to a metal plate with a scribe and then rubbing printing in to the design before printing on special Italian paper.  A little tissue paper is added before the printing stage.

This design was drawn on to aluminium plate with a scribe. This was the first print and I was really pleased with how it turned out.

The photographs are not good really now that the clocks have changed in the UK.

The above design is created partly using a photograph that I had taken of my daisies in my garden and mono type printed it on to parcel paper and then thick cartridge paper.  Love this design and I would like to try it again on a smaller scale for cards perhaps.

So that is where my Fauxdori sketchbook has got to so far and I have another evening class on Monday.

I also managed to get my A level work back today, so light willing I hope to show some of the contents here over the coming weeks.

Will be adding more to my sketchbook and at the moment I have been spending some of my bedtime reading looking at an Art Journalist call France Papillion who is brilliant to watch and learn from.

Take care all

xx