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Hi everyone, Ona here to bring you this month's Monthly Muse! Hope you are all doing well! And very sincere apologies for being late, I had it in my head that it was going to start on the 8th! pffffft! Clearly I am going senile!!! LOL!!
This month's muse is THE SEA.
What do you think or feel when you are by the sea? For me it holds so much mystery and magic! I can identify with the sea in so many ways, it speaks to me on so many levels and can invoke a lot of different emotions and memories.
Here is the main muse inspiration I want to use this month, drawing various inspirations from it to work on each week. There will be four weekly challenges, starting on Monday, June 5, June 12, June 19 and June 26. I hope you will join me!

I found this image on Pinterest and have created a MUSE - THE SEA board where you can find it, along with some other images that speak to me in some way. Feel free to take a look and perhaps create a board for yourself if you use Pinterest.
PINTEREST BOARD - MUSE: THE SEA
The first thing that drew my eye to this image is the the vintage feel of it, I love the muted colours and it reminded me of my distant childhood memories of being at the beach, being free to just run along the beach with no worries, chasing the sea gulls! So for this week the inspiration is to use Vintage Colours.
Week 1 Inspiration - Vintage Colours
Colour is a powerful component of any type of art journaling page as it can convey a whole host of emotions and feelings. For this week, think about the memories you have of being down by the sea and create something using vintage sea side colours.
Colours of the sea can include:
- the many shades of green and blue that make up the sea on a sunny day
- the deeper tones the can be found under the sea
- the brilliant flashes of colour as those fishes and mermaids go swimming by
- the greys and blues with streaks of white that can be seen on those stormy days
- the touches of white as the waves roll into the shore
- the many shades of yellow, browns and black as the water reaches the sand and rocks to wash over the shells and pebbles on the shore
but make sure they are MUTED, no bright colours for this week!

Week 1: Create a layout about the sea using vintage type/desaturated colours.
There are a few ways to get a vintage feel to your colours, here are a few:
- desaturate the colours using the Hue/Saturation levels
- place a layer at the top of your pile and colour it a light brown colour, change the blend mode to Color and then play with the Opacity to give you a vintage look
- use a vintage type paper and use as described in the previous point
- use a Sepia photo filter by going to Filter>Photo Filter (I use PSE14 so yours could be in a different spot)
Here is my page:
You can use any size layout. The Skinnies templates available HERE. In addition @cfile created one cool triangle template that you could use (Christa's awesome template is HERE on PSD- let us know if you need any other format!). Or you can use the one layout and just keep adding to it, which is what I am going to do this month......... kinda like a progressive one, but it's totally your choice in how you do it!

Please post your layout to the Art Journaling Gallery HERE and then post it in this thread by copying the code (at the right of your gallery image) from the box under "Share BB Code".
We will draw a winner at the beginning of next month, even more incentives for your inspiration! You can use any products in The Lilypad store, make sure you follow our gallery guidelines. Pages are due last day of the month.
If you have any questions, ask here in this thread. Looking forward to seeing what you creative ladies come up with for this week!

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will pop into the gallery to leave some love later today!