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 :)