zaubernuss - witchhazel

Junicorn 27th - 30th 2021

"I will be a unicorn whatever the cost" seems like a good excuse to squash an ice cream cone on your head... (I'm not sure how I'd react if one of my kids did that though. Depends on the time of day, level of sleep deprivation, temperature and general annoyance quota, I suppose.)

I have lots of what I call "mop-up pages" in my journal: large sheets of paper I use to protect my work surface and catch any overspray when I work with spray inks. I also clean my brushes and stamps on these papers, scribble pens and test letter stamps. etc. These papers usually turn out really cool and have far more (and better) texture than anything I could deliberately make and plan. I usually fold these large sheets in half and glue them together to make them double sided and sturdier. 

The girl is another Art by Marlene die cut from an older collection. (I don't know if it's still available, the booklet is "A5STANSBLOKBM06" if you want to look it up - these products always have funny product-IDs.)
I improvised the ice cream and the cone - I know it's not super realistic looking but I did my best and the message comes across well enough... And I love how the strawberry ice cream matches her dress and clashes with her amazing hair!

This incredibly cute unicorn is another creation of my daughter's. It't an older one but I don't remember from when exactly. R had a phase when everyone and everything she drew had a piggy nose. (I'd have to go through the keepsakes box for a dated piggy-nose picture.)
The "horn" is actually a lock of the mane, I think, but it can totally pass for a horn and there's a crown as well. The brown and pink blob is a cookie with marshmallows, if I interpret it correctly. Then there are some replacement crowns but I have no idea what the other thing and the arrow are supposed to be. She can't remember either - haha! 

I found the original of this one on google again and it's playing an electric guitar. I changed it to a ukulele as that's the instrument I'm currently learning to play. I had to erase and re-draw it probably five times until I was happy with it. I coloured the mane, tail, hooves, horn and ukulele with the metallic gel pens again. (Can you tell I'm totally in love with them...?) I love that they actually create quite a good rainbow even thought that's not what the assortment of colours goes for. 

I'm quite fond of this one. 

Last one! I searched for illustrations of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle looking for inspiration. It seemed like the obvious thing to do but I couldn't find anything I liked (and felt competent copying). Then I remembered this lion I drew (well, copied from an image I had found on google) in the back of one of the Hogwarts Student Notebooks. 
I decided that I wanted to do the badger of Hufflepuff House (my house) as a unicorn since every animal has the right to be a unicorn. And because it was fun. 

I totally used the wrong paper for this old encyclopedia page - aren't the birds just wonderful? - and it smudged a little when I wanted to erase the pencil lines. Or maybe I should have let it dry a while longer. I went over the image again and then used a white ink pen to push the text (and the smudges) more into the background. It worked fairly well and looks all artsy now - haha!

 

Things that I've learned while doing this challenge: I don't do well with challenges like this. I already knew this but now I know even better. It was fun but also very stressful. I told myself at the beginning that I would take it easy - and I did as far as I allowed myself to - but had I taken it any easier I probably would have quit altogether after a week but without admitting to myself that I have quit; and then I'd have felt very bad and guilty towards the end of the month. I enjoyed myself a lot once I started but getting started is always very hard for me. Which is really ironic in a way. It's like knowing you'll feel better after having cleaned the house or done a work out but it seems like such a big effort to even get started and not doing it is so much more comfortable... 

Maybe I'll try again in October, not "Inktober" which is a thing already but "O-cat-ober" which my husband invented when R asked if there is any month that might go with cats. I know how to do unicorns now; I need to learn about cats... 

 

Lots of love! And unicorns... and cats. xxx

Junicorn 21st - 26th 2021

Time seems to run away from me recently. I think it is because I spend so much time out in the garden with the little ones. Crochet squares can be taken outside, picked up and put down easily - blog posts need to be written inside at the desk... 

I had The Little Prince on my mind that day and decided to invent a little planet for my unicorn. There's a tree for shade, a stream for fresh water, in the stream lives a rainbow trout to keep the unicorn company and there's plenty of rich grass to eat. And sometimes the Little Prince takes a flock of birds to pop over for a visit...

I drew this on a strip of outdated wall calendar (which is why the days of the week and the numbers on the back of the pretty picture are upside-down). 

People who see my journals - friends, relatives or customers at arts/crafts fairs - often ask me what I do (or what they are supposed to do) with pages in journals that already have something on them. Sometimes I have to keep myself from snorting at that, to be honest. I mean it's paper, isn't it? It's a page in a journal, isn't it? You can do with it whatever you normally do on pages in books/journals/diaries: you write or draw on them, you glue things to them, you collage or paint over them. The fact that there's writing on them already need not bother you! Use it, if you can come up with a way to incorporate it into your design or layout, or cover it up if it bothers you. The page itself is just a substrate like any other page. (The same goes for pages made from fabric or acetate or other non-paper material.)

I found this unicorn logo on google and copied it onto another piece of old calendar. The rainbow is my addition and I made it a little curvier than the original was. I also used a white paint pen to white-out the lines running up my drawing - white paint pens are an absolute must-have for art/junk journaling.

I drew this little unicorn on a piece of inked scrap paper I had lying around on my desk. It already had the perfect green ground to have it graze on. I used pentel hybrid Dual Metallic gel pens (not a sponsored link - just to show you what I used) which are super sparkly! I tried to catch the light in the second picture and it really doesn't do it justice - the shimmer and sparkle is very hard to catch on camera but it's beautiful! 

This is a moonicorn - or a new design for a rocking horse... I drew this with the straw-thingies from ink sprays straight out of the bottle. It's not my favourite so far but it's starting to grow on me. 

I like this one. The ink I used for the moonicorn bled through to the other side of the page so I wanted to cover it all up and strengthen the paper. I cut a piece of watercolouring to size for the background - one of my kids had done this some time ago and to my shame I can't remember which one.
I always cut backgrounds a little bigger than the page they are supposed to go on - I can always trim any excess but adding strips, while possible and sometimes with great effects, can be tedious and is not what I wanted for this project.
The focal points are from the Art by Marlene Artsy Arabia paper elements books. I used the design on one of the tiles as inspiration for my border. The quote is from the Tim Holtz ideaology clippings sticker book. These stickers are literally clippings from old books turned into stickers - different fonts, aged paper colours, wonky cutting and all.
I love Marlene's fun and colourful style and her wonderful imagination. 

T has been reading a lot of old Lucky Luke comics recently. (My dad had been keeping them for years and wanted to get rid of them now - we'd had them when I was a child already...) Anyway, Lucky Luke famously is "the man who shoots faster than his shadow" and the illustration of Lucky Luke's shot shadow is on the back of almost all the comics. 
Said illustration inspired me to draw this image of the donkey whose shadow is a unicorn. 
I used pencils for colouring and I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out (even if I think my colour blending needs work). 

 

I'll be back with the remaining four unicorns very soon!

Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx