A Letter to Divine Places

The last few days I have been busy rock climbing, going to book club, and playing a seriously cool game of Dungeons and Dragons.  I told you I was a nerd; however, I was able to find a little of time to do some art journaling with the prompts given out for the February Journal Challenge.

The first prompt was places that one would like to visit.  Personally, I would love to visit many places but if I had unlimited possibilities I would like to visit Europe during the Victorian era spending most of the "vacation" in England.

The second prompt was divinity.  I decided after much thought to go un-religious and focus on items that I find heavenly such as wine, art, music, colors, plants, and love.  It was a great warm and fuzzy exercise.

The third prompt was a letter. I just purchased these great stamps which are stamps of post cards and writing.  I then did a little writing of my own.  I was going to go a little more wild, but I liked the stamps so much I didn't want to cover them up, so I left the page as is.

Inspiring Inspiration

Thursday morning I was able to read the FJC prompt because my office was closed because of the gigantic blizzard that had just hit Chicago.  The prompt was inspiration, focusing on how to discover inspiration, how one goes about being inspired, etc.  And to be perfectly honest I was very stumped as for what to do with this prompt.

I guess in away I was having difficultly getting inspired in regards to the notion of inspiration.  In fact, I was befuddled by it all day.  I could easily write about inspiration and how it happens for me, but I wanted to complete the prompt like I had the other through a visual means.  Part of my problem was that my inspiration is completely random.  I don't seek it out or look for it.  I just plod along in my daily life and wham it hits me at unsuspecting moments.

I have to say I'm glad that I'm perceptive enough to see it, although I can be rather dense at times, so I'm sure I miss things.  But on the whole I have to say I catch on pretty well.  And I truly believe the "happy accidents" of inspiration, at least for me, are the best.  

The question then becomes how do I display visually the nonsensical way in which my inspiration is thrust upon me?  Finally, I thought perhaps I could just pick some of the items that spark my interest through my average day such as color, books, people, etc.  So finally at 10:30 last night I sat down quite unsure of what I was going to do and began to demonstrate my mode and means of inspiration.

Once I got going things seemed to just start to flow, and I believe that is how I do get inspired most, by piddling around with my art journaling materials and just letting the paint splatter and the tissue paper stick with guided haphazardness.

Beyond a Surface Connection

Today's February Journaling Challenge was to think about the people we would like to meet either dead or alive.  Naturally at first I thought about all the famous and power people I would love to meet from the past and present, but then for some reason I thought of my great-grandmother on my father's side.

A picture of her hangs in my parent's hallway.  She's about my age in the picture and we look strikingly similar, including the same nose, eyes, and facial structure.  I never met her because she died three days after my grandfather was born, and I've always wondered what she was like.  Would there be anything we had in common beyond our looks.

It was this thinking that inspired this page.  Initially I was going to cut a figure out of a magazine, paint it black, and then center it at the bottom of the page.  Then I would place a number of items that people may discuss on their first meeting around the figure.

So I found a picture that I liked, cut it out, and then placed it on a white piece of paper to paint it black.  When I finished I removed the cut out and found that a really cool negative image was left in its place.  Because of this surprising discovery, I decided to place the black picture on one side and do a negative imagine on the other side.  I would then pile the items in the middle between the two figures. 

It would represent us having a conversation, so to speak.  I then added a few questions and wanted to portray the uncertainty if there would be any connection between those that share the same genes.

It was a great prompt to get me thinking about who I would really like to meet given the chance and what would result of that meeting.

Balancing Inspiration

Thanks to my art journaling group on Flickr, I found out about the February Journal Challenge. Everyday a prompt is posted, and the idea is to use that prompt as a jumping off point for inspiration.  Obviously, today was the first day of the challenge and today's inspiration was balance.

At first I was a bit confused about what to do with this, so I decided to flip through some old magazines to see if anything stuck my fancy. While I was perusing the pages I thought about finding a person with their arms out, allowing me to then cut out other items and stack them on top of their hands.  But as I was thumbing along I found a picture of a stool and my idea started to take a whole other shape.

I placed the stool at the base of the page and then proceed to stack items atop it.  The magazines that I was flipping through are all about beauty and fashion and while I am certainly not above such things it occurred to me that the time we spend on looks and beauty may be putting other items off balance.

This prompted me to place a bottle of perfume directly on top of the stool, from here I cut other pictures out and placed them precariously on each other to demonstrate the notion of beauty not being a stable base.  The rest of the page ca be interpreted many different ways.

But the bottom line is that I had a lot of fun and was able to think about life a little more deeply on a subject I wouldn't have thought much about if it wasn't for this prompt.  I'm looking forward to see what awaits me tomorrow.

Creative Mayhem

Now that I had discovered the wonders of paper in art journaling.  I decided to mess around with a few of my other supplies including a bizarre substance called gesso.  So I grabbed a nearby magazine and began thumbing through it for inspiration.  Soon I came across an article on make-up and it had a graphic of different colored powders.

 I torn it clean out of it binding, chopped it to the size I thought they should be, and pasted them on a piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper. This is the paper  I had been using for my journal pages thus far. I added a block of text and decided to, under the recommendation of, my go to gal, L.K. Ludwig, mix some gesso with blue acyclic paint and wash it over my new smattering of pictures. 

I squirted some blue paint and some gesso onto a nearby paper plate, mixed them like mad, and brushed some of the mixture on my pictures.  The concoction was a little thicker than I anticipated, but I brushed over it a few times to thin out the paint and let the color show through.

When I finished it was a very stark look and to be honest I wasn't thrilled, so I thought I would paste a light colored piece of tissue paper over it to mute its appearance.  I chose a pale pink paper and pasted it over the entire page.  The result was better but not something that I would classify as masterful, but still not bad.

I began showing my art journal pages to my best friend/roommate, including the ones I bombed on.  I did it because her take was always interesting.  So I showed her my latest creation and she, quite unexpectedly, loved it! She thought it was my best work yet!

I couldn't help but smile and think to myself that maybe my "mistakes" aren't really mistakes at all by just artful fate.  I needed to stop thinking so much and just go with the creative mayhem.

Rip it!

(Torn card stock and clippings from an old calendar)

I had faced an art journaling flop, and it wasn't nearly as horrifying as I anticipated.  Thus signifying that I could conquer the world! This revelation led me to think about using other mediums other than just paint.  Don't get me wrong painting is a blast, but I wanted a break from digging it out from under my fingernails.  Seriously, I don't know how it gets in there and takes up residence, but when it does it is hard to evict. 

I decided to play around with some card stock that was originally intended to be used in a scrapbooking project.  So I ripped out a few pages that struck my fancy and began tearing the paper every which way. Once I had unleashed all my pent up hostility on the card stock.  I laid the pieces out in a hodgepodge fashion.  I didn't put too much thought into this.  What it basically boiled down to was slapping some glue on the back and sticking it in a vacant space on the page.

When I finished this I was quite pleased with my handiwork, but I felt it needed more.  I had noticed in some of the examples that Ludwig provides there was a hint of text.  So I began the hunt for written words, I finally came across an old shoe calendar I had and in it was a mini-introduction.  It was perfect.  But then I thought...you know what would be more perfect?  Add one of the shoes!  I was a genius.  I spent the next half an hour rummaging through the calendar to find the proper shoe.  I had lots of choices, but I finally chose one with a nice color and gigantic purple flower.  One can never go wrong with a gigantic purple flower.

I pasted my new loot on to the page and voila- Art!  It was so much easier than I thought it would be.  I couldn't wait to try something else!!