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.