Peaceful Hearts

Tags

Altered book, art journal, collage, gratitude, Heart, Journal 52, Peace

This journal page reflects the influence of the Journal 52 prompt and really fun  art journaling video, my work on the sets at our theater, and my time in the swimming pool at our local YMCA. I participate in aquacize classes and swim 5 laps once a week when I can. I am grateful for the activities that I am able to participate in that help keep me healthy. The lights reflecting off the water last Saturday were really beautiful in my super blurry vision. I am so happy with the heart stencil that I made. It needs to be remade on something a lot more substantial, but the shape makes me happy. The word Peace came from my yoga class this morning. It just seemed like the perfect way to complete this page layout. May you be peaceful.

Love!

Tags

Altered book, art, art journal, Art Journal Every Day, collage, friends, gratitude, gratitude journal, love, Valentine, zentangle

Here is my gratitude journal entry for Valentine’s Day eve. Yesterday was a day full of love for me. I had lunch with 3 of my BFFs and we had the opportunity to talk for more than an hour and ate yummy food. After that I was picked up by our Art Association director to help her with a SPARKS program. I’m not sure what the acronym stands for (feel free to google it and let me know), but it is a wonderful program! What we did was give some community members who have memory problems and their family members a tour of our current exhibit. The current exhibit includes art by Jesse Coraggio and Justin Behm. They are young men who grew up in Beaver Dam and went off to get art degrees from UW Steven’s Point. They show a maturity beyond their years in their art. We were inspired to play with watercolors and ink after touring the exhibit. We used white crayons to hide messages on the paper and learned about mixing colors and blowing paint with a straw and a hair dryer. We also added salt to our watercolors to see how Jessie got some of his interesting textures. After they were dry we used a variety of black pens and markers to highlight the negative spaces or draw shapes and words. Everybody was really engaged in the activity and it provided so much rich conversation. I really enjoyed partnering with Jessalyn, too. She is becoming a new BFF!

Today has been all about cats and art. The cats mostly were ornamental and watched me as I played with a lot of different media. I’m creating a window display for a fair trade store that we have in town and it has been really fun. At this point I’m covering boxes of different sizes with paper and gesso. They will display the days of the week when I’m done. Maybe I will take some photos of the process and the product!

What is bringing you joy this Valentine’s Day? Who loves you and who do you love?

Tonight my sweetie and I are having a nice homemade dinner and then off to a concert! Tomorrow we are cleaning at a Buddhist temple. Making mashed potatoes as an act of love. Yum.

Stars Above

Tags

100 Mandalas, art journal, Art Journal Every Day, gratitude, gratitude journal, Mandala, quotes, stars, Van Gogh

The Journal 52 Prompt for this week inspired me to finally make a luminous mandala. The painting page that I made at the painting party last Saturday reminds me of the Northern Lights. Jounaling on it with white pen added to the effect. I layered the Van Gogh quote in Digital Image.

Dream Wheel and Diva Challenge

Tags

100 Mandalas, art journal, cats, collage, Diva Challenge, Dream Wheel, flowers, Gratitiude journal, gratitude, Tummy Rub Tuesday, zentangle

Here we have the journal pages that are leftovers from my dream wheel collage and a Zentangle tile all on top of my latest morning pages. It has taken me a few days to complete my Dream Wheel. It is for the online retreat I am doing with Kathryn Costa from 100 Mandalas. It is my vision board for what I consciously and unconsciously want in 2016. The 3 goals that I went into the project thinking about were to look at moving as an opportunity no matter where we end up. My husband is currently looking for work all over the country and as part of saying No to fear and worries in 2016 I’m looking at this as an opportunity for an adventure with my sweetie. The second goal is to transform the mess that is our storage room

into my own sanctuary for creating art. The third goal is to continue to challenge myself in making art that is meditative and beautiful for me and explore some more commercially viable avenue of art, such as Etsy. My second set of coloring pages is almost done!

In the upper right hand corner of my journal page I have a Zentangle tile. I participated in the Diva Challenge for the first time in 2016, and really for the first time in a while. I stopped doing it when my vision challenges got to be too much and it was fun to just tangle on a tile with no other purpose except to make art as part of a community of artists! Check out other fabulous tangleations at

Here is a closeup of my Molygon tile:

Here are some process photos for the creation of my Dream Wheel.

I’m going to need a bigger circle!

This is why I always have cats in my collages, because they insert themselves!

Hey I could submit that one for Tummy Rub Tuesday!

One of our nicknames for this big guy is the supervisor.

Here is my finished Dream Wheel! Surrounded by the beauty of flowers, here I am working, and meditating, practicing art and yoga, in a tidy studio with excellent storage options. This year I will go through a door with my cats, husband, and camera, full of creativity and friendship, all as part of the adventure. Opportunity is the word that kept coming to mind as I was finally putting this collage together. I have been gathering the pictures for quite a few days and I’m glad I didn’t stop the gathering too early! What a rewarding process and I hope that it continues to inspire me all year long!

What are your dreams for 2016?

RIP David Bowie & Misc. Gratitude

Tags

Altered book, art, art journal, collage, gratitude, watercolor, zentangle

These journal pages include a lot of sketches and practice work. Also, I realized I had not marked the new year and I thought I should get that in here. I usually start a new journal with a new year, but I’m really loving this book that I am altering and I plan to stick with it until I’m out of pages. The photographs of Andreas Feininger are so gorgeous. It is lovely to let bits and pieces show through as I did on these pages or to allow the picture to help enhance my journaling as on this page layout from September.

This week marked the passing of David Bowie and Alan Rickman (Snape from the Harry Potter movies). Both were fabulous artists and I am sorry for their passing. What a wonderful blessing though to have lived at the same time as they did! I was fortunate enough to join my sister, Janine, to see David Bowie on the Glass Spider tour. We were somewhat disappointed because we were great fans of his earlier work, but I’m so glad we got to share the experience. Of course our favorite song was “Janine.” We spent many happy hours singing and dancing to Ziggy Stardust and his other albums.

In my previous post you saw the product of my thank you cards and this shows some of the progress. I really enjoyed painting the old book pages with watercolors. I used my Dr. Ph Martin’s watercolors first on wet pages.  I was inspired by some of the art I saw at the Eco Squared Exhibit opening.

They dried a lot lighter than I wanted so I went in with my Crayola watercolors to make a wall of color on each page.

I am really happy with the way the colors blended and pooled. These old pages really soak up a lot of water and are kind of fragile. Fortunately I have a lot of pages to keep experimenting on. I really loved how the thank you cards turned out when I cut out the letters.  I used a bunch of the scraps on this gratitude journal page layout. I also included a technique that I saw at the Eco Squared show. One of the artists had cut out areas of paper to let text or musical notations to show through. I, of course, had to add a layer (or 2) of color in my interpretation.

I was so happy when I saw that I could have the words “drawing” and “circle” show though the cut parts. I was going to do some illustration on top, but I really like how it turned out with a simpler design.

My latest mandala is the antithesis of simple design. My vision has been good enough that I was able to make the kind of mandala I really love to draw – super fancy.

Have a beautiful day!

 

Crazy Quilt of Gratitude

Tags

100 Mandalas, art journal, crazy quilt, Flower of Life, gratitude, gratitude journal, Journal 52, Mandala

Hey, I did a journal 52 prompt! The prompt this week was grid, but on Julie Fei-Fan Balzar’s Art Journal Everyday blog she had some posts about an amazing quilt show. And I thought, what a great combination! She also posted about a class she did on lettering and I realized I hadn’t done much with that in a while, either. I’m feeling somewhat better and have been able to get back into working in my gratitude journal every day. That in itself is something to be super grateful for!

The eye and some of the other work on the right hand page was done by a guest artist who was here over the holiday weekend. Great synergy to help me get back into the habit.

I finally did a flower of life mandala and I’m excited to do another one. I’m over half way on my 100 mandalas challenge. I thought I would be able to complete the challenge this year, but my body had other plans. I am happy with the progress I have made and plan to continue drawing mandalas (at least) until I get to my goal of 100!

Have a beautiful day!

The Book That I Am

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, art journal, found word poetry, gratitude, gratitude journal, iridescent pearl, Mandala, Mixed Media, paper art, poetry, pumice, snowflakes, texture, yoga

Wow. This gratitude journal entry took me quite a while. There are layers of gratitude in this and a lot of textures. I was almost done with my ideas for the page when I came across this challenge:

The snowflake on the left hand page was not attached smoothly. I have been playing with a new way of making mandalas that combines my love of making snowflakes with mandalas. I used a makeup sponge to cover a paper snowflake surrounded by a circle cutout with blue acrylic paint onto watercolor paper.

After carefully lifting up the paint covered snowflake I tried to make a print of it in my gratitude journal. That is the mandala on the right hand page. The blue paint worked as an adhesive on the thin paper, so I decided to try to put the other snowflake in paint-side-up. I put E6000 spray adhesive on the page and what ever part of the sticky painted snowflake touched the adhesive there was no adjustment allowed. So, it became a spiky textured snowflake – quite in keeping with the challenge!

The lovely artwork on the right page was contributed by the daughter of a friend who purchased a set of my coloring pages. The figure’s hand is on the left-hand page – I loved the detail of nail polish and wanted this to stand out. There are layers of writing about things I am grateful for from the last 2 weeks, but the 2 biggest are YOGA and ART. I had the idea of doing the mosaic yoga letters from the first day I was able to get back to doing any yoga – I was that excited. Making these letters took a LONG time.

I wanted the mandalas and the 2 words to really be the focal points of the pages at this point so I was going to make the background a blue wash. It was about that point that I found the texture challenge. I was not having any luck getting the snowflake on the right to do anything I wanted so I covered the page with a combination of pumice gel medium, gesso, water, and blue acrylic paint. The overview photo doesn’t capture the texture of the combination very well. I used a tissue to clean up the blue paint and I decided to add one layer of the tissue to add texture to the right hand page. Here is a slightly better view of the left hand page and also shows the found word poem that became the title of the page spread. After I cut out all the letters for both yoga and art I cut out the words that intrigued me from the leftover bits of the page from a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress that is over 100 years old!

So here is the poem that left me breathless in its appropriateness.

Willing

Hand

I find

the book

that I am.

   

I am amused that I’m having technical difficulties arranging the photos of my cut out letters for ART. The process also shows my frustration with how they were turning out. I was amazed that the mulberry paper and tissue paper turned out a lot more boring looking than I had hoped. I ended up also adding some silver Liquitex paint marker to them and more gel pen marks after all of these steps. Adding blue acrylic paint to the page helped them pop out more.

I am happy with how the layout turned out as a whole and it works with last week’s Journal 52 prompt of Child’s Play. Between the guest artist and the snowflake base I felt like this and my willingness to play with my materials are thoroughly captured in this page layout. I’m actually happy with the mandala that started out backwards, too. I surrounded it with some Golden Iridescent Pearl mixed with the same blue acrylic paint and I love how that turned out. So here is my 100 Mandalas mandala 59 of 100.

Thanks for taking the time to make it through that whole post! Have a beautiful day!

Back to the Gratitude Journal

Tags

acrylic paint, altered art, art, art journal, collage, grateful, gratitude, Journal 52, quotes, stencils

I have been writing and arting in my gratitude journal, I have not been very good about posting about it however. Posting does make me a more faithful journalist, too. These pages started as a pallet for my collage and a place to clean off stencils used in the collage. I have a lot of scraps of watercolor paper left over from the cut pages I use to make coloring pages. I am starting to practice with new art supplies in little sketches that I will then write over. It takes the pressure off of making something finished looking when exploring new supplies and is providing me with lots of interesting backgrounds for journaling. Stay tuned for more!

The Journal 52 prompt for this week is Hiding Out and I feel like that is kind of what my journal pages have been doing. Actually, my interpretation of this prompt is about hiding the private thoughts and experiences in my published journal pages. Writing over images and some of my scribble/stream of consciousness handwriting provide me with ways to write about whatever I want without thinking about the publication part of it.

Here is a page full of quotes from the book I made for Jacob and with the city stencil from my most recent collage. Do you like it when I write out the quotes?

I have so much to be grateful for. How about you?

Have a beautiful day!

Completed Altered Journal

Tags

acrylic paint, altered art book, Altered book, Journal 52

Lots of finished pages for the journal. I have already given it to the wonderful young man and he was so happy. It is so wonderful when a handcrafted gift is appreciated. This process has really rejuvenated my personal journaling practice, too.

The book that I altered was about the senses and I had fun playing with the different headings. This orange page has a lot of interesting textures on it and I put some of the paint on the drawings of the hands on the facing page to go along with the idea of touching the paint. This layout for the “Smell” page is one of my favorites. It is created with a stencil, a sponge, and some black gesso then a white pen for journaling lines.

This page is another one of my favorites. I wrote some favorite quotes on the pages and I hope they are legible as I’m not really up to typing them each in today.

I’m having some technical difficulties. So I think I’m going to wrap this post up and post the rest of the pages another day.

Building with Paper

Tags

altered art book, Altered books, art journal, cherries, cherries with pits, collage, Elsie de Wolfe, gratitude, hostess gift, Liquitex paint pens, painting, painting workbook, paper art, quotes, simple syrup, Watercolor pencils

I am back in my altered book journal and decided to document the process of this week’s entry as I’m experimenting for a larger piece. I started out with the back of a piece of watercolor paper from last week on the left hand page. I found this quote on the blog Hey It’s Frances To and it really struck a chord with me. I really like what she has done with her lettering portfolio, too. So when I saw that the Journal 52 prompt was Positive Change we had another week with synchronicity! Hooray! My lettering is a little half hazard as I have not been practicing it very much lately, but I do like how the page came out overall. While my vision problems continue, I am finding different things I can do to express my creativity and make my life interesting and hopefully add to the beauty in the world. The flowers were cut out from a scrap of leftover map that I like to use as a metaphor for my intentions for where I am headed. I used marker in the middle and blue watercolor pencil around the outside of each flower.

The right hand page started with a few slaps of the paint that I’m using in our unplanned bathroom remodel. The shade of green is called Peter Pan and my son just finished working as the music director for our children’s theater production of Peter Pan Jr. It was just another funny coincidence that we chose that color – not intentional. The latex wall paint was not adhering well to the page so I used a credit card to spread a little gesso on the page. I added some blue acrylic paint for my sky. My cityscape was inspired by a project in the book The Painting Workbook by Alena Hennessy (now listed in my Reference and Recommendations page.)

I liked how the blue didn’t really cover the top of the page and I really covered the bottom of the page with the green. I used a tip from the Painting Workbook and drew into the wet paint with a watercolor pencil, but it didn’t work very well. I don’t know if that was because it was latex wall paint instead of acrylic paint. I will try again another day. I really did like how the scratched out flowers went through to the original colors on the page. I tried a few different brands of watercolor pencils and the Inktense ones left a little color, but none of the other ones did.

I decided that I wanted to make an Art Deco building in my cityscape so I cut different papers into shapes that were Art Deco inspired and I painted them in colors that made me think of Art Deco. One of the techniques that I used that I was pretty happy with was putting the long thin strips down the center of the band-aid looking pieces to make “windows” on them at regular intervals. I recently got a set of 3 Liquitex paint markers and I am really loving them. They were great for adding details to my “building.” I played around with the different paper shapes until I came up with a building that I found interesting. I did some journaling with a white pen on the blue sky and glued everything in place. I painted the flowers with the orange Inktense watercolor pencil after experimenting with a few other media and I drew some leaves and grass with green markers. I learned a lot in the process of making this page and I hope this has been instructional for you too!

On a totally unrelated note…

I made a cherry simple syrup without pitting the cherries. We got 7 pounds of cherries from our CSA and that is a LOT of cherry pits. For the last pound or so I was looking for something to do that would not require removing the pits and I had a hard time finding anything. All the simple syrup recipes I found required pit removal. I decided to try it with them in and it worked beautifully. So here is my version:

1 cup water

1 cup sugar

a bunch of cherries without stems but with pits

Simmer everything at a low heat for at least 10 minutes and then squish through a sieve. Keep the syrup in the fridge for as long as it lasts. It is fabulous in lemonade or iced tea. I don’t know what the shelf life is because mine doesn’t last more than 2 weeks. It also makes a lovely housewarming gift or summer party hostess gift.

I hope you have a delicious day!