Art Journal Journey - The Bee (and another)

When I was hastily doing research for my theme of 'type' at Art Journal Journey I saw a fabulous layout in an old Art Journal magazine.  It had been done by Carissa Paige, and I wanted to do something similar so here is my take on it, nowhere near as good as the original but then I don't want an exact copy.  That's my excuse LOL.

To begin with I had to find a print of a typewriter.  Lots about but copyright and things like that plus most of them are black and white and I wanted a coloured one.  Eventually I settled for this blue one which looks rather upmarket so I printed it out and set about cutting it out.  Very carefully I slit above and below the bail bar (at least I think that is what it is called, it's the bit that holds the paper in place) so that I could insert my paper in my typewriter correctly.  (You will perhaps notice my carriage return lever has fallen off, or it got cut off by mistake.)

The page itself was coloured firstly with Distress Inks - Squeezed Lemonade and Scattered Straw down the left hand side and Twisted Citron and Shabby Shutters down the right hand side, with both of them used more randomly at the bottom.  I chose my favourite Tim Holtz stencil on the left side and a circular one on the right.  A leaf stencil by Lavinia was my choice for the piece of paper with the Bee on - the bee is a favourite of mine but I have not a clue who manufactured it.

Then I chose a stamp from Dylusions to give the border across the top - it is something to do with Journaling (my poor old eyes cannot make it out nowadays), and I tore a couple of strips of patterned paper for the base, going over them with Twisted Citron to match in with the page.  The bee was stamped, centre stage on the paper.

Finally I wrote the words across the bottom following the curve of the tear in the paper "be industrious like the Bee - Write your own story" and finished it off underneath with my interpretation of the flight of the bumblebee.

But I have another page for you as well.  I so intended to devote a page to printing and my friend had given me some Ikea cards that had lots of letters and numbers on them that reminded me of typesetting.  I'd also found a picture of Caxton and his printing press that I intended to use and a picture of the cover of a book about Guttenberg.

We have Johannes Gutenberg, who in 1440 is credited with the inventing the first ever printing press modelled on the design of existing screw presses.  He invented the hand mould and the printing press which reduced the cost of printing book drastically throughout Europe.

In 1476 William Caxton is thought to be the first person to introduce the printing press into England.  As well as being a printer he is credited as the first retailer of books in England.  He was diplomat, merchant and a writer and the first book he is known to have produced was an edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

You can read about both of these pioneering men in Wikipedia.

To finish off my page I used the black and white pages I had been given to create the background, stuck pictures of Gutenberg and a sketch of Caxton's machine plus some typeface letters in a drawer, and then randomly cut out and stuck some letters and numbers on in colour to break up the monotony of the black and white.  Because the background was so busy I found the pictures got lost  and so I mounted them finding that two of them looked much better with a white mount around them than a black one.  Strange how we always go straight to black for mounting a picture.

Well, that really is it for today.  I did get carried away with my theme after my initially thinking I was stuck at six pages, so you got two today.