Happy July

Hi everyone.  Happy July. This past weekend was a busy one for me. With the heat my husband and I went boating the last 3 days. I am wiped out right now, but it was fun. 

So today I have a lot to show you.

First of all it is July 2, so it is time for Second on the Second Time to repost a blog post from the past. Today I am going back to July of 2015 when I had a storyline going on for some Art Journal Journey posts. The story was that Wally (an artist) had left to do some painting internationally  and his love Lizzie, didn't go with him. I had a whole series of  posts in which they went back and forth with letters. The theme that month was either postage or letters. But here is the last page which I painted.

You can check out this entire post here: The Finale. Or if you are interested in following their story you can jump back to July 2015 on my side bar and starting with the Journey on the 9th, you can follow them along. There's a few non-story posts in between, but if anyone is interested I can repost all the pages.

Next I also have a page for Chris's new challenge over at Art Journal Journey. The challenge is Art for Art's Sake. This time the challenge is to show some art journal pages and even better if you tried some new or hardly used technique.

I'm heading back to my Japan Travel Journal once again. Today I have this abstract page I made (which I don't use often) with some transparencies (which I don't use often either).

It started with this piece of paper that a gift was wrapped in. On our trip we did a lot of gift exchanging, which I believe is a big custom in Japan. I saved a piece of the paper because I liked the red design on it. After that I added the red rectangular card it came with on the bottom left, and I added a couple of postage stamps to right of that tag. I finally I took 2 transparencies I had in my stash, which were printed with these abstract designs and added them to my page. I am happy with all the overlapping shapes and images here.

I am also linking up to Moo Mania and their favorite colors challenge. Warm colors make great art pages and the slight touch of the cool blues here make nice contrast.

And finally, how about a few photos for this weekend's boat extravaganza? I know seagulls aren't the most exciting of birds, but here in New Hampshire they do mean a day on or by the ocean. (Do you know they don't have seagulls in Japan-or at least where I was?)

 This guy looks like he is on patrol. Maybe is you don't go slow he will dive at you.  :)

Yesterday it was also very calm and we went out to the Isles of Shoals (6 miles offshore) which is a group of small rocky islands and anchored in the harbor there. We had the dogs with us as it was cooler there and they could also swim. (Which we all did.) Maddie especially loves watching the birds.

Not just seagulls.  Ducks also.

And this cormorant which was fishing for quite awhile near the boat. Not sure what that was he caught an was eating, but he was having a lot of success.

I'll have more to show you on T Day. Hope everyone has a great start to their week.