Angels and Artifacts Junk Journal

Hey, everyone! Jane Chipp of Willow Blue Vintage, one of our amazing Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Angels and Artifacts Junk Journal for us this week. As you know, we feature one new Junk Journal project each week created by one of our creative team of artists. Our Design Team Members select from the 100’s of Vintage Image Bundles on our Premium Membership Site, for their creations, in order to show you beautiful ways to use those images. We hope you will be totally inspired by this series! So please make sure you check out the video tour at the bottom of the page…please scroll all the way down to see it. Are you ready to be inspired? I will step out of the way and let Jane tell you all about her lovely project…

I had so much fun making this journal! To explain it I need to give you a short history lesson. I live near an incredible 12^th century abbey (Cleeve Abbey, Washford, UK – it’s worth a look on Google). In the 1530s King Henry VIII separated England from the Catholic church and Rome (so that he could get a divorce and marry Anne Boleyn), closed all the abbeys and took away or destroyed the books, pictures and valuables. Many of the monks tried to hide the religious documents and treasures. When I walk around the peaceful ruins of the abbey, I can imagine that somewhere, buried away, there may be some of these religious items.

The vision that I had for this journal was of finding some of these long-lost religious icons covered in dust and surrounded by crumbling plaster and the signs of years of decay. Quite a tall order to represent in a journal!

The cover of the journal, and many of the pages, have a rough plaster-like finish with pieces of antique silk and numerous old papers covered in a chalky white paint. I kept to a simple book structure here with two signatures attached to the cover. There are no tuck spots as I wanted a more traditional book with treasures slipped between the pages for safekeeping. The journal is fastened with a ring of antique silk and has a rusty old key attached.

I used religious images that had a church-like aesthetic and steered away from the cuter, cherub type images. The Antique Ephemera and Angel Ephemera bundles provided the majority of the pages from which I made the journal as they have some powerful images incorporating angels as well as some beautiful printable journal pages with sky designs.

My main technique throughout this journal was to paint on top of Graphics fairy images using textured paint to make them look like ancient artefacts…you can learn how to do this in a craft tutorial coming soon on the Premium site. Some of the paintings were made into pages, others were made into cards.

The Antique Ephemera bundle has an image of an Angel holding a torch and incense which is etched and so just in black and white. I added color and wax to the image to create an antique looking page.

5A – Medieval Card

6A – Green Wax Page

Images 5A and 6A on the Angel Ephemera bundle were also uncolored so again, I added color and wax. Image 5A is probably my favorite in the whole book. It is an exquisite drawing, medieval in style. If you study it, you will see that the dress has unusually shaped folds.

Another bundle that I used was the Architect Drawings. I didn’t use these directly as pages, but I printed out some of the drawings and copied them as sketches on to the chalky backgrounds to add to the impression of the crumbling religious architecture of the Abbey.

ANGELS AND ARTIFACTS JUNK JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR

Let’s take a tour of it together:

• Antique Ephemera
• Easter Song
• Architectural Drawings
• Delicate endpapers
• Angelic Symphony
• Angel Ephemera

I also used images by searching for ‘angel’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Mary’ , ‘French holy and  ‘doves’ on both the premium and free sites.

I used some pages of handwritten script that can be found by searching the ‘Script Ephemera’ filter of the Images section.

I hope this journal has given you some ideas for using these fabulous bundles. Thanks for reading.

I will be listing this journal and some ‘Angel and Artefact’ parcels on Wednesday 16 June 2021 in my Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/WillowBlueVintage

Follow me on Instagram
See more of my work here.

Thanks for reading!

Jane Chipp

Check out the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership Site HERE!