Special Guest Spotlight on HELEN HOLLINGER

  This month, we are very pleased to introduce you to Helen Hollinger, one of our fabulous Guest Designers for this month!  Helen was one of our October winners who are all featured this month.

We invite you to get to know Helen a little better through her interview below.  Please also visit her social links which are listed in her Artist Bio.

Artist Bio 

Hi! I'm Helen Hollinger and am honoured to be a Guest Designer for More Than Words!  Thank you ladies! A bit about myself:  I live in Cambridge, Ontario with my hubby of 30+ years! We have 2 grown sons, aged 31 and 27! I am a retired RN and spend my time getting messy in my art journals and mixed media projects! I started playing with paper years ago when my sons were babies, scrapbooking their lives! After they realized that I took too many photos of them as teenagers and told me to stop scrapbooking them, I started art journaling! That was almost 10 years ago and I haven't looked back!  I love snarkiness in my art journaling and tend to keep things simple. As long as I can get messy and inky I am happy! I do hope I can inspire you to create!

My Instagram account 

My Facebook page 

My blog  

Q & A with Helen

How long have you been art journaling?

10 years.

What is your favourite art journaling supply or product?  

Hard to pick just one as I LOVE so many, but the one product (other than gesso and paints) I couldn't live without are stencils!

Are you inspired by a particular artist or artists, if so who? 

When I first started, France Papillon had how to videos out and after watching those, I couldn't stop. In fact, I was on her first Design Team she had. Today, I have many artists I follow and am inspired by.

What is your favourite colour palette to use? 

I love blues, turquoises, greys, black and white. 

Why do you enter art challenges?  

I love the inspiration I get from the challenges and the design teams. It sometimes it makes me think outside of my box and allows my creativity to try new techniques or look at things a different way. I have a hard time just "playing", and find that having a challenge keeps me creating. 

Helen's Interpretation of our April Main Challenge

I have to admit, I have a hard time with collage but I did it! I first layered down some torn tissue papers I had using Matte Medium. I then put a wash of white gesso over the whole area, followed by some quinacridone nickel azo gold and titan buff acrylic paint. I like these colours for vintage projects, they give you that worn old look on papers. I then used ground espresso distress ink over the entire area to catch the wrinkles in the tissue underneath. I added some stitching and some french knots because to me, vintage reminds me of this. As does my canvas page I used in my journal. To finish it off, I added a little girl, some washi tape and a quote incorporating the word Vintage. 

Thanks for sharing your beautiful journal spread with us Helen!  We hope that Helen's beautiful work inspires you to enter the Main Challenge this month.

Here's a reminder of our current Main Challenge:

Word Inspiration - VINTAGE

Creative Challenge - ADD COLLAGE