Egyptian Adventure Junk Journal

Hey, everyone! Kathleen Mower of BeAgain Books, one of our amazing new Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Egyptian Adventure 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!

Therefore, 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 Kathleen tell you all about her incredible project…

Hello everyone! I am Kathleen from BeAgainBooks. I’m here to share my junk journal vision of a vintage Egyptian Adventure. This journal is my latest Design Team project for The Graphics Fairy and I’m pleased to share it here on the blog today. I recently excavated the vault at the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership Site to see what treasures were part of the earliest image bundles and I discovered the fabulous Ancient Travels bundle. Because I had an old National Geographic in my stash and an oversized, glossy coffee-table book from the thrift store, I chose to focus on the images of ancient Egypt, and off I went on a mildly steampunk adventure to the land of the Pharaohs. I started with an old Reader’s Digest book cover and completely rebuilt the spine with cardboard and embellished it with heavy linen fabric and acrylic paint and inks. The natural desert colors of yellow ochre, ferrous red and orange, along with earthy clay and brown are used throughout the journal. A narrow brown leather strip covers the cut edge and a beautiful collage of various images features on the front of the cover.

The inside front cover reflects my love of layering and collage. There is never a shortage of fabulous steampunk images to choose from the Graphics Fairy. They feature six bundles specifically devoted to the Steampunk theme. This lovely woman comes from the recent Steampunk Adventures bundle and perfectly embellishes this initial double pocket. I created a little layered collage opposite on the first signature page to introduce the parallel Ancient Egyptian theme. Texture paste, colored inks and a little bit of “mummy cloth” are the perfect foundation for a paper cartouche sticker – lifted from the hieroglyphics images in the Ancient Travels bundle. No worries, of course that fabric is just !cheesecloth, dyed with a bit of coffee

I love to hand dye and enjoy using other mixed media techniques to alter the papers for my signatures. The very earliest fresco paintings came from the tombs and monuments of ancient Egypt and I wanted to mimic that look. I first chose several photo pages from an old recycled book and lightly sanded them to achieve a linen-like texture. Then I used a palette knife to smear texture paste and added random drips and splatters of acrylic inks to achieve the desired fresco look.

I created several postcards for the journal with help from the Vintage Postcards bundle. I just trimmed down photos from the recycled pages and glued them to the back of the postcard images. Lightly sanding the glossy photos and further distressing with ink makes them look realistic. This postcard is tucked into a simple pocket printed from the washi strip printable in the Steampunk Adventures bundle.

The steampunk style is distinguished by the use of texture and iconic motifs. Gears, clocks, rivets and numbers are very popular elements. I have created a fun cluster belly band and pocket spread with a photo image of a pharaoh’s coffin and using all of these elements. Again, sanding the glossy image softens and ages it to fit with the vintage vibe.

I love to take advantage of the designers at the Graphics Fairy and use the beautiful printable papers from the image bundles as often as I can. I love the color stripes on this paper and the underlying linen texture as well as the stately parade of ancient Egyptian characters.

Speaking of papers, using the “acid texture” from the Scratches and Grit Textures bundle allowed me to make my own distressed paper and color it to match the journal. It’s just like using paint, but with a completely different technique – digital! So much fun. I’ve used several of these interesting marbled end papers as pages and elements in the journal. The pebbly texture reminds me of small stone rubble in an archeological excavation and the deep saturated colors help define the mood of a sun-baked desert landscape.

All of the images I find from the membership site are perfectly prepared in large files that allow me to enlarge, cut and manipulate them in many ways to get the result I want. For this double pocket I cut the pharaoh character from a larger image scene and then enlarged him to make a piece that I glued to this tag pocket. The smaller pocket came from the border of the same tomb scene. I added some stamped and stenciled gears to keep the steampunk aesthetic consistent.

Smooshing beautiful colors of Distress Ink is another favorite way to alter the papers that I use in my journals. Blue was a heavenly symbolic color in ancient Egypt, as was green which represented the fertility of the earth. These colors accent this layered grouping of what I call “shorts.” I always include a few in my signatures. The woven fibers ground the mood again in the earthy red and yellow.

A portrait of a handsome gentlemen is the focal point of a typical collaged pocket. I made this page a bit more steampunk by adding a hard brass number charm, the deep maroon marbled paper and the clock motif. This keeps the page settled in steampunk, but I couldn’t resist adding the scarab beetle and the linen tag topper as a nod to the Egyptian theme.

I often include some kind of fancy folded paper in each of my journals for extra journaling space. This time I have used a rustic textured paper in a deep gold color and folded it simply across the top of a journal page. Pinned with a bent paper clip, it creates two more tuck spots for additional ephemera.

The Egyptian blue lotus is such a prominent motif in the ancient tomb paintings that I knew I wanted to include this motif somehow in my journal. I went looking for it in thousands of flower images and found it by searching first for flowers and then for blue flowers! It appears in the Lotus and Water Lilies bundle and I was delighted to be able to feature this pretty flower with other hieroglyphic images in this large digital collage page. I added an actual textured collage in the bottom corner with a large, cartouche cut-out “sticker” as the focal image.

I love using altered junk mail in my journal projects. Here I have collaged a few paper scraps on this golden yellow envelope, toned down a bit with ink and transformed into a large coin envelope to clip over the top edge of a page.

I finished the journal with the same lovely image that I started with – the gorgeous steampunk lady – this time in a washi strip along a narrow folded pocket. The printed journal paper is another piece of a printable page from the Steampunk Adventures bundle. I love that steampunk hat on repeat.

Thanks so much for your interest in my journal! You can see a full video flip through here. The journal will be listed for sale in my Etsy shop (link below).

EGYPTIAN ADVENTURE JUNK JOURNAL SHOW  & TELL VIDEO TOUR

Premium Membership Bundles used in this project:

Ancient Travels
Steampunk Adventures
Rich Marbled Endpapers
Instant Ancestors 2
Antique Portraits 2
Lotus & Water Lilies
Masculine Ephemera
Vintage Postcards
Scratches and Grit Textures

I hope you will visit me here:

Kathleen’s YouTube

Kathleen’s Etsy shop
Kathleen’s Instagram

Thanks so much!

Kathleen

Check out the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership Site HERE!