Journalling! Blobs! Bands!

I feel so good journalling right now! There are so many blobs and stars and smiles to draw and cut and stick! I love it. Thanks. As per my journal inspiration post from yesterday, I have been doing some journalling too. My favourite is this green blob page because I was painting some other things and I usually like to use up the last dregs of leftover paint on painting some blank pages or scraps of paper. I didn't know what I was going to do with these painted things, but they transformed into this lovely blob creature. My most spontaneous and most simple and most cool page I think. I love this blob.

I really like using envelopes to draw on and cut shapes out of. It feels different to using fresh, blank paper. Both are good, but just a bit different. I also like the different colours and textures on envelopes. I love the blue screentone-like insides to some envelopes. A variation of pen thicknesses is good too. A variation of anything is pretty good, I mean I guess that's the point of collaging a lot of the time.

I have fallen deeply in love with Fall Out Boy's album American Beauty/American Psycho so I had to dedicate a little bit of space to them. Bubble writing never gets old. It reminds me of doing title pages in exercise books at school. They were fun.

I think my attitude really dictates the way I journal and it's important for me to have a space to not care a huge amount about what I'm doing. That way it feels genuine and my creativity doesn't get lost in the effort to make something very consciously.

I love journalling so much! It's the best thing and I love being able to just stick down a picture of Harry Styles and a picture of a lemon and draw an eye on the lemon or something and just have that fun kind of stuff happening. Yep!

Inspiration: Journal Pages

Katie Ness

Journals are like my favourite thing in the world because they're so personal, they are portable objects, memory houses, and there's so many different ways you can fill them. Journals are like homes that you carry around with you and I love seeing people's journals, sketchbooks, diaries, etc. I love writing notes and ideas down, I love collecting small things and I love the entire concept of diaries and journals and diaries so much. They kinda feel like everything. Everything is in there.

Keeping and filling books was probably my favourite part of school (I still have my leaving book that I made everyone sign and stick funny things into, and I have a book that was given to me for my 17th birthday - an amazing scrapbook full of nonsense. One of the coolest presents ever.) I actually really miss the school exercise books that I totally, definitely never stole from the stationary cupboard in bulk.

I do have a bunch of notebooks piled up in my art drawer, and although I keep my daily diary in a dedicated day to view 2015 diary, I kinda want to do some serious, dedicated journalling seperately from that. There's a certain page feel that lends itself best to certain projects, and I find it hard to decide whether I like teeny tiny notebooks or bigger ones better, but I feel like my favourites are cheap and flimsy ones. I like when they make that crinkly sound when you turn the pages. It depends on what sort of thing you're doing though, and my main journal dilemma is when my pen bleeds through the page. That happens a lot, and although I love thin pages, I hate being forced to collage the next page to cover up the bleed through. Journal issues! I still prefer ones with thin pages though, because it just feels much more natural and carefree somehow. I'm psychologically affected by thick, high quality pages. It's too scary. I need non-threatening, weak pages!

Anyway anyway anyway, here are some super cool journal pages I have gathered to make me feel inspired and motivated and excited to journal. Please enjoy them.

Caitlin Hazell

Morgan / butt-kraken

Sibylle / lavendersprout

Quenby Sheree

Demii Whiffin

Katelyn / snugglysleepy

'Kids Doodle' Drawings

I am sharing some beautiful and cool drawings I made with the best app in the world: Kids Doodle.

I like the mismatched colours, the ugliness of certain options (like the glow brush used on my two last drawings here) and the smallness of the images. It's refreshing sometimes to come back to small, low quality things in a time where huge pictures and file sizes and lossless, transparent PNGs are the norm. The smallness of the screen you're drawing on also forces you to be a bit ham fisted with your strokes, which adds to the chunky, simplified aesthetic. I love it a lot because it totally goes with my passion for the simplified and viscerally pleasant process of drawing when you don't care very much about your outcome or being neat.

For some reason something about this reminds me of when, back in the golden days of Myspace, I loved visiting the self styled graphics pages that had profiles and pages full of their meticulously edited and curated graphics just for jazzing up profiles. I loved this and it's one of the things I miss most about Myspace (I liked picture contests too).

Anyway, look at all this colour! These pictures are like the inside of my brain/heart/soul/whatever.

Let's Play Pokémon Yellow #8: The Alien Gym Leader

So here we are at Seafoam Islands. We have just discovered them, and we are going exploring!

We found a bird! Why is there a bird just hanging out here in the depths of a cave? Is this bird an anti-social bird?

He is an icy bird named Arthur. He is our friend now.

He might have been inside a dark and lonely cave because he couldn't fly. I taught him to fly, and now I will use him as a bird taxi, because that's a totally normal thing to do.

There is a person just swimming along the edge of Seafoam Islands. We can't really go anywhere from here and we're clearly intruding on this stranger's personal water space, so it looks like our best option is to be escorted elsewhere by our new friend.

We're flying to my home town. Artie must have pretty high strength and stamina to take us all this way. Definitely a good asset. Also he can shoot ice beams out of his beak, so that's pretty cool.

The only way to reach the next town in our journey is to surf South from Pallet Town. I just wanted to take a moment to enjoy this nice lilac and light blue colour Palette. I guess it's fitting that Pallet Town has a pleasant colour palette.

It doesn't take us too long to reach Cinnabar Island, and from this sign's description I'm probably gonna have to move here A.S.A.P. because everyone knows my desire for mini rolls burns strong.

There's a little research facility here, which is interesting, although when this guy says they study Pokémon extensively I can't help but wonder if he just means that they just stare at them for a while with hearts in their eyes.

Apparently they have the technology to bring fossils back to life, so I gave someone that fossil I got in Mt. Moon way back when, in the hope that its resurrection will bring about some large scale destruction. It's the little things in life.

???

Well, if the gym is locked, I guess we should go and explore this dilapidated building instead, right?

What a SNAZZY chessboard floor.

Someone has left all their revealing personal diaries in this place. Also that bloke standing there is a burglar. I fought him off and took his stolen goods for myself. His stolen goods were actually just one single Twix.

According to this diary, Mewtwo and I share the same star sign, which probably explains a lot about me. Mewtwo's horoscope this week is "you will have a pleasant surprise in the form of a small and unexpected gift". For me that probably means the Twix, for Mewtwo, who knows? Maybe Mewtwo is munching on a Twix right now.

What is it with secret bases/labs/etc and massive house plants? Perhaps the plants have many secrets.

The diary continues: "He can open any jar without struggling even a little bit. Never before have we seen this power."

We found a secret key in the mysterious abandoned mansion, and for some reason this unlocks the gym. It has the same chessboard floor style (it must be a trend here) and is a fire themed gym. I don't know why it was locked though. Anti-social.

Before we actually tackle the gym though, I'm just going to beef Bert up a bit, because he's so close to evolving into a Blastoise now. My little turtle's growing up.

Okay. My boy friend made me a lasagne and it was so good that I died and now I'm a ghost who smells of lasagne. Pros and cons to that one. Anyway. fight me.

IT'S HAPPENING

IT HAPPENED
My baby's a huge muscly turtle with CANNONS on his back, What is nature even doing right now?!

Back we go to Cinnabar gym. Blaine looks like a literal alien so maybe that was why he locked the gym up like "no-one will notice me, an alien, inhabiting this gym, if I just lock it the heck up". Okay mate, but Mulder and Scully are on their way now. Also I beat you by blasting water cannons which are somehow biologically attached to a turtle. This is a strange day.

Has no one else ever beat a gym apart from me and Meanie? Is the population just incredibly low? What's the story here?

So this is the state of my team at the moment. I think it's safe to say we've had an eventful time, so let's take a rest, maybe just lounge about in that research lab or at the coast. Yeah, just chilling by the coast. Cool. See you next time.

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Diary: Eurovision & Salad

This weekend was Eurovision weekend and my favourite entry was Belgium's (Loïc Nottet - Rhythm Inside). My plan was to get well drunk and it started out well, but halfway through I ate a Waldorf salad and then I felt too sleepy to drink. It was really fun though. I think it's the most I've enjoyed Eurovision for years, so that's nice. I liked quite a lot of the songs. I thought France and Italy's entries had really strong singers, and I loved Latvia's atmospheric sound.

As for the salad, I am hoping to gain lots more salad knowledge in the future, because salads are seriously amazing. Fruit salads, potato salads, and salad salads. I love salads. It's really cool all the ways you can mix different foods together and I want to be an expert of that.

Inspiration: Faig Ahmed's Warped Carpets

I saw a photoset collection of some of these bizarre carpets floating around on Tumblr and they caught my eye because of my general interest in all things distorted, stretched, glitched, and pixelated. I like the ability these pieces have to make your brain go "???". That feeling of seeing something that just isn't quite what it's supposed to be is quite exciting and strange and fun, like you're a little kid discovering something that you didn't know was a thing.

I also really like the aspect of blending the traditional/cultural/historical with modern or alternative shapes/designs/materials. Some of the warped forms are very visually familiar to me as the same kind of warping often happens when moving things on a scanner bed.

Images via Escape Kit. Check out Faig Ahmed's website here for more.