February 2025 Calendar Journal – Mixed Tape

Hi Friends!

Here is my second journal page for 2025.  Can you believe that?  I’m quite embarrassed by my lack of creativity this year due to one thing or another, or just life generally.  Anyway I hope I have broken though my block now after making a start on the Full Deck challenge and I really wanted to get some pages done for this month’s AJJ theme.  This is the first of three pages I wanted to make so I just hope I can get the other two done before Friday!  This short February month always catches me out!

Today’s art . . .

This is a page for Vicki’s theme of Music on Art Journal Journey I’m so sorry it has taken me so long to join in this month, I had so many plans and page ideas but this month has not been the best.

When I saw that the theme was Music, this is the page that popped into my head first.  I remembered this old(?) 2018 stamp set from Concord & 9th and wanted to use it for my February calendar.  This month has been so crazy that I am only today making my February calendar so just think of all the things that haven’t been done because of no calendar!

The Ecoline markers I used for the January page have bled through the paper a bit so I had to cover it up with some tissue paper and gesso. I was going to use this TH tissue with the birds because it also has a music sheet background but since I was going to gesso all over it, I didn’t want to cover up the birds, so I used a different one in the end.  That also meant that I couldn’t use the dot grid paper to draw out my calendar but I found this old calendar of NYC (2016) and the month of October had the dates on the right days for this month, I just had to paint over the ones I didn’t need for February.  I was going to use the page itself until I saw the beautiful Central Park photo on the other side, so I ended up photocopying it instead.

After that I went to town with those stamps, stamping mainly the cassette case stamps all over the background.  Then it was time to colour them in. Here are some detail shots…

Believe it or not I still have one of those “boomboxes” from the 90s.  It was a double cassette player with radio.  The double cassette option was so you could record from one cassette to the other.  And yes I still have some cassette tapes  (hoarder) and they all still work perfectly.  Did you ever make a mixed tape or a mixed CD for someone?  OMG I had a flatmate that was constantly making them for various girls he was obsessed with.  I kept thinking, why does he insist on inflicting his bad musical choices on poor unsuspecting women?  HAHAHA

If I remember, I will take a photo of the boombox for the next page.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.   As always, thanks for reading and Happy journalling!Ingredients
recycled A4 bullet journal, waterproof black pen, Pitt artist pens, versafine claire ink, mixed tape stamp set, old calendar page photocopy, TH tissue paper, white gesso,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – Music