AJED Setback

Well goodness. Last week I got a dish washing injury that is keeping me from doing much of what I want in my art journal. I cut, rather deeply, the tip of my right index finger which makes it incredibly difficult, and painful, to wield anything in that hand. As I am rather right-handed, I can't just switch to the other one. Today, I just said enough's enough and thought about what I could do. I ended up pulling out a few pages for in my journal and started slapping some watercolor onto them in preparation for something else later.

I was amazed by how good just that little thing felt. There was something about brushing that color across the page that was calming and exciting at the same time. I'm hoping to heal quickly so that I can get back to the detail work soon.

Art is scary

I'm the kind of person who has to have a personal calendar. I write down everything in my life in there: doctor's appointments, Girls' Night Out, dates with my hubby, playdates, even what I plan for us to have dinner every night. This year, I found a Retro Mama calendar that just spoke to me. On one particularly rough day with the kids, I decided to do a little art therapy and tore out a photo from the calendar. I adhered it in my journal and decided to add the talk bubble. Then I sat and stared at the thing every day for a week as it sat out on my counter.

 

I had no idea what to do with that darn thing, but I hated it. I realized that I should have probably painted the background before adding the picture, but what could I do about it now? Then, I saw an episode of The Joy of Painting (I love that show!) and saw Bob Ross use Contact paper to make a pseudo frame on a painting. He put the paper around the outside edge of his canvas then painted the center of the canvas, occasionally overlapping the Contact paper, and when he took it off, voila! A frame showed up on the painting. So I tried it on my journal page, but sorta in reverse. I put the Contact paper over the elements I didn't want to paint, then went at putting a background on.

 

To be honest, I didn't have much of a plan here, but I thought perhaps blending some colors from top to bottom would look nice. It just didn't turn out the way I'd planned. It was too bright. So I just kept adding things to the page. First some white to tone it down, and when that didn't make it less "pretty", I pulled out the black.

 

It was just about this time that my husband really got nervous. I think he thought I'd lost my marbles or something the way I kept mumbling to myself and making these grunting noises. "I liked it how it was when you started Honey." Problem was, I didn't and I couldn't tell him what it was I was trying to do (he also didn't know about the Contact paper yet.)

 

Right here, this is where my Ah-Ha moment occurred. Those grunts turned into a sigh and I got REALLY excited.  Again, my husband was a little worried about me as I bounced around the kitchen waiting for the paint to dry.

Then I took off the Contact paper and I instantly felt contented. This page suddenly showed exactly how I felt when the kids were doing their thing. Perhaps I'll add some journaling later, but I don't think I really have to. This page perfectly conveys the frustration and the feeling of being overwhelmed that I sometimes feel being a stay-at-home-mom.

My new art journal page

I guess I broke through that fear I was experiencing a few weeks ago because, slowly but surely, I filled that page and I'm so glad I did. I love the end product. What do you think?

 I was so happy with how things were going, this was the point I froze. I think I was afraid of "messing up", that I didn't want to risk putting something new on the page. But after a little internet browsing for inspiration, I started going at it.

 I had originally planned on adding color to the entire page, but after doing just the area around the leaves, I decided I love the contrast between the colors and the black and white zentangle. I still might add a little something in the colored area, but I'm in love with this as it is right now.

We are experiencing technical issues . . .

I was suddenly struck by some kind of creative bug last night and got two new pages started (though not yet completed) and wanted to take a chance to post some pictures here. Unfortunately, I am having one doozie of a problem getting them to move from my camera to my computer then onto the web. Hopefully, I'll be able to do it tomorrow because I am really happy with how they are shaping up, even if I'm in a bit of a fearful moment with them. I'm so happy with them, it is making it hard to continue even though I know they aren't finished. I don't want to risk "messing" them up. It's a feeling I've had before and I know I'll get over it. It will just take a courageous moment, then I'll be able to continue on. But until then, I'll be making a nice backlog of great starts and that's never a bad thing.

Not much to show . . .

I've gotten a chance to take a look at some of my fellow Art Journaling Everyday participants' projects, and I am awed by some of them. I, on the other hand, don't have much to show for what done as far as Art Journaling is concerned. I have done some, honest! LOL. The color blocked page in my previous post? I added some journaling along with a bit of doodling. I discovered that the blocks are actually much too dark for that, but is all a learning process, right? I have also been doing a lot of collecting lately in my free time, mostly of photographs and magazine bits that I plan on using in various projects, so tonight I plan to get into the trenches so to speak after Daddy gets the kids to run up for bed. Which reminds me, shouldn't they be up from nap by now?

Not much to show for my first day of art journaling, but it's a start. I decided not to buy a special art journal for the project. Instead, I collected bits of watercolor paper I have and put them loosely inside an old hard bound sketchbook that I cut the pages out of. I spent much of this afternoon working on getting the office pulled together, and was able to complete 3 scrapbook layouts which is amazing all by itself! I couldn't get a good picture of them to post here. I wonder if all the other bloggers I've seen are scanning their layouts to post on their blogs because I just couldn't get a good shot of one. Oh well, it's a learning process.

Anyway, by the time the kids were climbing into bed, I discovered that I hadn't done anything for my art journal (though I got lots of creative time in earlier today). So what I ended up doing was color blocking a piece of paper in about 10 minutes with the plan of doing some more on it another time. Guess we'll see where it goes from here. =-)