April Showers- SNOW showers!

I was hoping to get one more Journal 52 page done before I make the April wrap up of pages, but I have stewed over how/what I want to do, and have had lots of appointments, and little art time, so it didn't happen. It was a REALLY hard topic for me, but I will go into that next month.
So, I have only 4 pages in April, but here they are:

Week 13 - How Does Your Garden Grow

I have been working on another large project, that I am considering showing progress photos of instead of the completed project, because it is become quite involved. But back to this page-- I have been doing a lot with flowers and fairies, and I was just in the mode to make flower fairy gardens, so here I have created yet another jam packed page with bunches of fairies in among the many flowers. 

Can you find them all?  (there are 21 fairies on this spread) 

Week 14 - Rain or Shine

Well, this is not a very up beat page, but it felt like we were never going to see Spring here in Northwest Wyoming. We are used to Spring storms, but usually sometime in March we start to have a few warm days. Here it was heading into the latter part of April, and still no warm days. The poor flower boxes and pots still have the dried up leftovers from last fall. A few tiny specks of green coming up at the very bottom of the old dried stumps is good news, but I don't see having a beautiful pot of blooming flowers for Mother's Day like I do most years. :( 

If you look closely you will see those darn snow flakes in the sky on my pages, and I think the words speak for themselves. 

Week 15 - Party Animals

These two pages are completely digital except the piece of teal washi tape down the center of the binding, because the edges of the papers were trying to pull up. I wanted to incorporate the lively little bunch of poochies we have here at our house, for this weeks prompt, but by the time I was able to find all the photos, I realized it would be just as easy to put the whole page together in My Memories digital scrapbooking program, then it would to find a coordinating paper in my stash, and print the photos. I think I found just the right pictures of these little buggers!

Week 16 - Recycled Art

I thoroughly enjoyed putting this page together- I had an advertisement for the craft store, that was going to expire before I could use it, so I started the page with all the coupons from the advertisement. Then I stole some wrappers from the girls' Easter candy, and part of the packaging from some Goldfish crackers, the hang tag from my beautiful Hydrangea plant, some stamps and part of the envelope from Canada from a swap I participated in not long ago, a card I got with the plant from my Birthday in March, and then I added some brightly colored washi tape to fill in the empty spaces. I am not sure if I will leave it like this, or add some journaling, but I will decide that later.

Thanks for following my April journey through my art journal pages. I am working on May pages, as well as a few other projects I plan to share, when I find time. That's all for now~

Journal 52 - February Wrap Up

Well, we are 8 plus weeks in and I am still going strong on my Journal 52 art journal project. One page a week is working great at this point- it is still winter, and boy a winter it has been here in the Mountains of Wyoming. We have had snow, snow and more SNOW, and several bouts of below zero F temps. I have not been overly ready for Spring til about this week, when I realized it is only 2 weeks til my birthday, and we still have well over a foot of snow on the ground- not just in spots, but EVERYWHERE. That is very uncommon for our area, but I am hoping with the amount of snow pack we have, that maybe our summer wild fire scares will be diminished greatly.
Well- onto the project, and my last 4 weeks of pages:

Week 5 Prompt : Abstract Art

I haven't worked much with abstract art, but I started the page with just some random line squiggles, then zentangled inside the sections of the random doodling. I then added some color with markers, then put down a floral stencil and covered it with black gesso. I used the gesso, because it gives great coverage, and I did not want anything but what was under the stencil to show. When I removed the stencil, you could almost make out the floral shape. I decided it was kind of one dimensional, so I added an outline with a white paint marker. It made it really busy, but gave it lots of motion. 

Week 6 : The Lost Art of Love Letters

I did not want to dig out all the little messages my sweetie has given me over the years, but still wanted to incorporate the fact that we are together 20 years and going strong. He asked me to marry him on Valentine's Day, so this prompt being the week of Valentine's, seemed very fitting. The photos were taken by my mom, in City Park in Cody, Wyoming where we still live. We have moved around a few times, but have come back to Cody. It is home, and where we want to stay. I look forward to the next 20 years with my sweetheart. 

Week 7 : When I Grow Up

I loved the way this page turned out. It was just a random stick of stuff on the paper. I started playing with the new washi tapes I picked up on sale, and then it just kind of evolved into hair, so I added the face shape, and the shirt, and then I thought she needed to have a face that looked as if she were pondering the question: "When I grow up, I want to be..." 

I took a class from Claudia Rossi, which really changed the way I do a face structure. It is so important to get those proportions right, and it is amazing how much better my faces are turning out. I will definitely be able to come into my own style with this newly gained knowledge. Best class I have taken to date! 

This page is mostly washi tape, a little acrylic paint and a few alphabet stickers. 

Week 8 : Found Poetry

This was so hard for me-- I stewed over it all week. I am not great with taking a page of text, and circling a few words in succession, and making it read anything understandable. It just isn't something I can do well, or at all for that matter. I envy those that can, because it really is cool when people do that. So I started flipping through junk magazines, for cool "key words" that caught my attention. The first awesome word I found was "cosmic". I knew I had to use it somehow, because it is such a great word, and to find that in a magazine snip-it is pretty rare. Then a few pages later I saw the word "attract", well, I had to use it too. So the phrase I came up with is: "Your Love sends me into a state of Cosmic attraction." Yeah, I don't know that it means anything, but it was funny, and fun all at the same time, so I made a galactic background using my Inktense pencils that my sweet hubby bought me for Valentine's Day, and then  after I activated them with water, and then let them dry completely, I covered them with a very watery layer of black gesso- it is hard to see in the photos, but you can see the different haze of color shine through the black. Then I sprayed the page with some ink sprays, in both metallic shades and just white and black. That gave it the forward and backward layers of "stars" shining in the night sky. When that was all dry, I then used a wet paint brush and tapped on it with some white paint to make splatters- these are the closest stars you see. I then put the photo of my husband down, and then used water soluble oil pastels to smudge a halo effect around all the words and the photo. I feel like there is still an element missing, but I can't put my finger on it yet, so i am going to leave this page as it is for now, and move forward- I may come back to it at a later date. 

Well I am rambling quite a bit tonight, but there are my 4 pages for the weeks of February. Yay, I have completed two full months of the project, and I even remembered to share them with you here on my blog! Great big high five! Toodles :)

Journal 52 (January in the bag)

I started this art journal "class" at the start of the new year. I am not sure it is a real class, as I am not really "learning" much, but more of something to look forward to accomplishing each week. It is basically a group of individuals who come together to bounce off one another, and we are able to then share our pages by posting a photo on the Facebook group page. The gal in charge posts a "prompt" at the beginning of the week, and then we can use that as a jumping off point, to creating our journal page. We will have one page for each week of the year, so if I am able to follow through for the whole year, I will have a very full art journal.  I have done year long projects before, but they usually consisted of one page a month, and then I pass the book on to the next person, and so forth, or one page a day in my art journal for a period of 30 days. I have not been "committed" weekly for a whole year before, so we will see how this goes- I am doing this along side my college daughter, so maybe she will keep me on top of it.
I started by folding watercolor paper and making signatures, and sewing them together with the Coptic stitch. Then I dug out my real leather pieces, and cut a cover for my stitched signatures. I glued the chipboard "covers" to the leather, and then wrapped it around and made a flap for the front. I used an elastic headband for a stretchy closure- I set a grommet in the leather, and then stuck the headband through the hole, and tied a tight knot in the head band, so it wouldn't pull through the hole in the grommet. Then I just stretch the loop around the journal, and it holds the flap shut. I made the flap rather big, because as I work in the book, it is going to get quite fat, and I still want the flap to overlap the front cover some.

As part of the prepping of the book, most people decorated their front covers, but because I chose to use real leather, I did not want to alter it in any way, so I did a title page instead, which worked out great, because I had figured it out to have enough double page spreads for each week in the book, so I didn't want to have just a blank first page.

Week one prompt: Up Up and Away

There were so many different takes on this prompt, and seeing them all pop up on the Facebook page was really cool. Mine turned out a little subtle, but I wanted to draw a full body figure, which I have never done before, and to make it look like she had movement was really hard. I suppose the more I draw the better I will get, but for now this is where I am at. 

She was done with only colored pencil.

Week 2 prompt: Somewhere, Some Place Simple

I was so impressed with all the fun places people used as their place to feel inspired. The first thing that came to my mind when I read the prompt was my bed. I know that sounds silly, but I am a severe insomniac, and I usually just lay in my bed while my mind races until I finally get to sleep. Those hours of trying to wind down, usually bring lots of creative ideas. This looks nothing like my actual bed, but oh, well. :)

Week 3 prompt: What Makes Me Smile

This prompt was really very self explanatory- Journal the thing that make you happy or smile. My original idea for this page never materialized- I tried 4 or 5 times to make it work, and it was really a flop... I ended up Gesso-ing over it all and starting from scratch with a totally different idea. It is not what I envisioned, but it is on paper, and I am OK with just letting go of this one.

Week 4 prompt: Building Character

This was fun- self portraits! OK- Not even close to a self portrait, but I am free to journal how ever I want. I was really trying to work with watercolors for this face, but I learned that it is nearly impossible to "build" on watercolors- I am not sure how to shade a face without building colors on top of each other. I would get a good base, let it dry, and then go to add more layers, and when I would try to blend, it would just release the color underneath-- so frustrating. So, I tried mixing with Gesso, to give it more of an opaque nature, but when I would add the wet medium on top, it would reactivate the watercolor below, and I would have a mess again. I set it aside for a day or so, thinking a solution would come to me, but the only solution I could come up with was to Gesso the face again, and start with another medium. When I added the Gesso, it made for a really muddy mess, but I just went with it.  I then used lots of layers of colored pencil, and blender pencils, to achieve some kind of shadowing. It is not the best, but I think I am going to have to walk away from this one too. I am trying to remember that this art journal is for trying new things, for practice- not for masterpieces, but for lots of creative play and lots of failures.

I will try to post monthly with the pages I have done for the previous month- we will see how that all pans out in time.