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 

Junicorn 12th - 20th 2021

I didn't have much time for elaborate art work last week but I did manage to create a unicorn for each day even if it was just a small doodle (aka childish line drawing) like this one I made for the 12th. 

This one I made for my grandma who passed away quite unexpectedly on the 13th. 

(Please don't shower me with condolences in the comments/on facebook - I'm not posting this with the intention to fish for sympathy.)

I tested this fairy stamp (by Lavinia Stamps) on a scrap piece of paper and then gave the fairy a unicorn horn to stand on. She's lighting the unicorn's way to fairy secrets... 

This is a little scrap of sheet music - it's only about 3cm wide and 6cm tall. I sketched and erased maybe ten different unicorns - you can see how faded the printing started to get - until I finally got the right one. Making things tiny really isn't as easy as I thought it would be; but I like how this little one is hopping and prancing to the fa-la-la-la. 

I drew this adorable seahorse on a scrap piece of scribbled-on graph paper (my son's scribbling). I used an image I found on google as a rough guide and changed it up a bit. She's going to a fancy dress party, using a spiral seashell as a horn.
I added shimmer water colour sea weed (and I'm still not sure whether I ruined it or not by having some of the leaves go in front of the seahorse). 

This is a tiny playing card from an incomplete old board game my mum saved at work - playing cards and game pieces make great foundations and/or additions for mixed media projects. I gave the fish a horn, used a shimmer gel pen for details and a scale pattern on the background, forgetting that gel pen won't ever dry on the surface of the playing card. It smudges a little bit every time I touch it...
I used a We Are Memory Keepers "link punch" to attach the card to the page; just for something a bit different. 

I adore this winged rainbow unicorn! It's another one of my daughter's unfinished and discarded works of art. I coloured it with my shimmer paints and glued it to this uneven spread in my journal. I really like how it just happened to fit on there so perfectly. 
I cut images that go across the fold in half, by the way. It makes it much easier to adhere them securely, it adds less bulk to the center of the page and it's not as likely to peel off at the center when the page is turned over and over. 

This was totally stealing my daughter's idea - haha!
You know; the German word for 'unicorn' is Einhorn. (Ein means 'one' which makes a unicorn a "one-horn".)
The German word Ei means 'egg'. So my daughter said there should be a unicorn that hatches from an egg and it would be an Ei-nhorn - haha! 
I totally had to use that...
(The shadow of the horn is probably not at all in the right place but I don't care.)

I had to use another one of the cool images from my toddler's picture book. This species of horned bird is called Peachpecker and they feed mostly on peaches and apricots but also damsons or plums once they are ripe later in the summer and early autumn. 

 

I'll be back with the next batch as soon as I can!

Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx

8th, 9th, 10th & 11th of Junicorn 2021

I skipped Junicorn 7th. I wasn't feeling great that day and I said to myself: "Self, this is supposed to be a fun and enjoyable experience and you don't have to force it." So I decided not to force it...

My Junicorn 8th picture is this chocolate wrapper. Zotter is a fantastic, eco friendly Austrian chocolate manufacturer who makes delicious (and sometimes downright wacky) chocolate - and lots of other (organic and/or fair trade and/or vegan) products.

(Their lemonades are amazing... You can visit their factory and take a tour which includes tasting everything you want, they have their own farm, restaurant, hot chocolate bar, shop, beautiful grounds, etc. If you're ever in the area you should definitely count in a trip - calculate an extra two hours just for the shop, I promise you will need that time.)

Anyway, I love their fun and stylish packaging design. I've used many of their wrappers and images in collages and art journaling already.
I had this thoughtful wolf (or is it a fox?) sitting in a pile on my desk and I decided to turn him into a unicorn. I cut the horn into the card stock and backed it with a little piece of coloured acetate. It glows when you hold it up against the light. (You can actually see a better picture of it on my instagram, if you want to take a look.)

On the 9th I chose to simply take a picture of a crochet unicorn I had made for R when she was maybe three years old. Green was her favourite colour then so naturally I went with that. I used some cotton yarn I had in my stash from some other project.
The pattern is called "Ragdoll Unicorn" by Spin a Yarn Crochet and you can find it on ravelry or on the spinayarncrochet website. 
It's not new but it's still a unicorn I created so I think it counts. 

For the next day I drew a little picture of the crochet unicorn because I didn't have any ideas and not much time to think of anything. I love how it turned out actually, it's really cute and looks almost even more dreamy than the original... (And I only just realised when uploading the picture that I forgot to draw the ears - hahaha!)

Today, 11th of June, I made a quill and ink drawing on old book pages. I love using a quill and ink and I should use them much more often! I think it's just a really unique look you can't get with any other tool. I cut the tip of the quill myself and I have no idea if I did it right but it works. I have to dip it fairly often but that just adds to the effect in my opinion. 

I googled "medieval unicorn" and scrolled thought the pictures until I found an image I liked (and that seemed like I could copy it - most were way too detailed). The original is a mosaic but I don't know (and don't care) if it's a real medieval one or an imitation. Also, the unicorn is actually wrestling a lion but I decided to have it dance in an enchanted forest instead. I didn't have enough space for the lion and he looks kinda odd... 

I glued the page into my journal and only while I was doing that I thought that I could have measured the page before I started and included a nice medieval looking border or something but of course I didn't. It's fine though. The trees sort of act like a frame for my unicorn. I did ponder whether to colour the leaves in metallic copper (gel pen) but decided not to. I didn't want to ruin it... I'm sure I will do another ink unicorn this month and I can try it then. 

 

Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx

6th of Junicorn 2021

It's the end of a four-day weekend for us and it's been a really nice but rather busy one. Today has felt quite full as well, even though it wasn't... Sometimes the time just slips away and at the end of the day I don't know where it has gone and what I did that day, which is why I needed something quick for today's junicorn project. 

Toddler picture books to the rescue! I really like the images in this book - it's called "Komm wir zählen" by Tadashi Ohashi if you want to look it up - and maybe I'll have unicorned them all by the end of the month. Today I chose two snails and turned them into snailicorns. I used clear packaging plastic again and made a flap on the side of an undersized page in my journal. 

I love how the light shines through when you flip through the pages - like a stained glass window.
A few years ago I stumbled across an artist on Etsy who made fun cards featuring various animals she'd turned into unicorns saying that "every animal has the right to be a unicorn". That totally stuck with me and is the reason I went for snails today. 
(I know I made a note of the artist's name somewhere but I have stored that information in such a safe place that I can't find it right now - sorry!)

 

Lots of love! And unicorns - or snailicorns... xxx

3rd, 4th & 5th of Junicorn 2021

My daughter draws - a lot! - and every now and then I have to go and extract piles of paper out of her room for sorting. I'm sure most parents know how it is. You'd like to keep every piece of art your kids create but often that's just not possible. It's definitely not possible for me simply because there is sooo much of it! And quite honestly: not every drawing is worth keeping - it's just the truth. Many are really cool and well done and beautiful and creative and original and imaginative and whatnot; but there are many which only have a few lines on them, were started but not finished or are printed out colouring pages that were carelessly coloured scribbled over with neon markers and are just plain ugly. 
Anyway, it's my job to sort all of my daughter's creative endeavours into three piles:

• keep and pile into a large box to look at and marvel over much later
• discreetly stuff into the recycling bin (mostly the ugly colouring pages, torn pieces of frayed paper pulled from under her desk and wardrobe and trial/error pieces with only a few lines on them that were abandoned to start a new, better version)
• unfinished pieces with a cool person/creature/castle/landscape/tree/flower on them that were still deemed unworthy of being finished

This last pile I keep with my journaling supplies and I use the half-finished things my daughter drew to collage with. She knows about this and finds it both funny and very exciting. She always lights up when I show her one of my art journal pages that has one of her drawings as focal point. I think she considers it an honour that I'm using her art to put into my art (because she thinks I'm a fabulous artist - bless her!) - just as much as I consider it a great honour that she lets me use it. I really love her style and her approach to drawing!

The above unicorn is one of these unfinished drawings. All I did was clean up the line art a little and colour it in. I cut it out and stuck it into my journal - no need to do anything else to it. 

On Friday, 4th and Saturday, 5th my mum came over and I helped her create Thank-You Cards for all her friends and colleagues at work as she's retiring at the end of June. We made a bunch of colourful papers, including this rainbow striped one I used for the above unicorn. We had this scrap left over and I decided to cut out a simple silhouette. I google-image searched for silhouettes of horses, printed one I liked, added the horn, simplified the mane and tail for easier cutting, transferred it to the rainbow paper, cut it out and glued it to a scrap piece of wrapping paper with the white foliage on it. I had planned to do a different unicorn that day but I finished sticking panels onto card bases after my mum had left - it was quite late when I even started with the unicorn and I decided to keep it quick and simple. 

Yesterday, after my mum had left and the kids were in bed, I made this unicorn-dragon. I didn't come up with the dragon design myself though. I had seen a beautiful illustration of a dragon done in this style while searching for something else and saved it in my inspiration file. (I have an inspiration file and I use it for exactly that: inspiration. I never use other people's pictures, art work and images as they are without permission.) I'd love to tell you who did the original dragon drawing but I don't know - it didn't say anything about the artist in the original source. I even tried reverse-google-searching the image but it was nowhere to be found any more... So if you see this and think I might have copied your drawing, please let me know.

I changed the dragon's posture/the arrangement of its body to better fit my page format and matched the colours to the flowery wrapping paper I used. I drew with paint pens with only a light pencil sketch as a rough guide. Then I added the medieval-esque vine as a border because I felt like it needed something more. It doesn't show well in the photo but the background of the wrapping paper is actually gold. Only a little of it shows because there are so many flowers covering it up but the gold that does show is a lovely accent and I deliberately left the last of the dragon's scales uncoloured which means he (it's definitely a he) has one gold scale. 

 

Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx

2nd of Junicorn 2021

The description on today's page says it all, really. 

You know these enormous paper pads you're supposed to use as a desk protector? Well, T has one of these and uses it to take notes on (mainly when he's playing computer games that need puzzles solved like you need to do in Machinarium or Monkey Island). Recently I saved one of these, rather frayed and battered looking, pages from the waste paper bin... It had all these cool digits and arrows on it and I knew I wanted to save it for collaging. 

I drew and cut out the shape of the horn and used a Derwent Inktense pencil to colour it in.

The line of writing down the right side of the page is an old "shopping list" done by R when she was little and couldn't actually write yet but always wanted to imitate mum or dad making lists. 

That's how "runicorns" came into existence... 

 

I'll be back tomorrow.
Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx

1st of Junicorn 2021

Have you ever heard of "junicorn"? Maybe not - I hadn't until maybe a year ago, or two. It's a fusion of the month June and the word unicorn. It means that you dedicate the month of June to creating something to do with a unicorn each day - I know it mostly from art journaling circles on facebook, instagram and youtube. 

I've been trying to find out how long that has existed already but didn't get very far. My husband, who knows how to do this sort of thing, found out that the term junicorn was first googled in 2005 or so and that most of the searches were conducted from the Czech Republic, apparently. But the sources aren't specific about what these searches were initially about at all...  

The hashtag #junicorn was first used on instagram in 2016 but the whole thing as a movement didn't take off until 2018 - that's all we could find out. If you happen to know more about how this came to be, please let me know - I'm quite interested!

I mean, there is also Mermay - mermaids being the general topic in May, Stamptember - stamps being the art supply used throughout September and Inktober - October being dedicated to the use of ink. My daughter actually lamented the fact that there is no month dedicated to cats or kittens. I've pondered about it all day and couldn't think of anything while it took my husband about 15 seconds to come up with O-cat-ober - hahaha! Maybe I'll turn that into the next "thing"... 

Anyway, back to junicorn: 

This is my first piece for Junicorn 2021. I actually surprised myself with wanting to participate because these monthly challenges aren't something I usually enjoy. I tend to get stressed about them really quickly, feeling like I must create something, no matter what! And when I miss a day I feel bad and the whole thing turnes into a chore rather than something that is fun and that I enjoy doing. 

That's why I've decided to keep this really simple and not to get too ambitious. I've not fixed on a new journal to use only for this - I'll work either directly in my personal journal or on single pieces of whatever surface takes my fancy and stick/tip them into the journal. 

For this first one I used a piece of clear packaging plastic and permanent markers. I traced a horse from one of my toddler's picture books (which is in a rather cool, slightly abstract, retro style) and turned it into a unicorn. I did the black lines on one side and coloured it in from the other side, as permanent marker inks tend to push each other out of the way which makes it hard to colour without distorting the outlines. 
I used a torn notebook die on the right edge and clear sticky tape to attach it to the left edge of that undersized page you see it on. I could flip it out of the way and still write or draw on the page if I wanted to. 

It doesn't show in the picture, but the gem stone on the tip of the horn is actually purple and it glows and shines in the dark... ;) 

 

See you tomorrow! 
Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx