I was up until three a.m. last night working on this collage. Some personal things have been going on, and I’ve been working through my feelings about them in my art journal, resulting in some intensely personal pages. This page in particular means a lot to me. I cried when I finished it, honestly.
This one just makes me happy. The more I look at it, the more I like it.
I found a deck of Disney Princess cards I bought years ago and it inspired me to do a Beauty and the Beast inspired collage.
I really love how it turned out (I think it’s the best thing I’ve made so far, actually), so I hope y’all like it too.
I really love the way this collage that I made last night turned out.
Experimented with my lace doilies for a background for a journal page. The results were fairly disappointing. A paintbrush doesn’t work very well, and neither does my paint roller. A makeup sponge works pretty well though. And the lace doilies don’t work well at all, but the larger ones are better.
I used a heavy body acrylic for the first time, and I’m not sure I like it either, so I may not buy anymore of them. I think I’m getting kind of spoiled by the better quality paint I’ve been buying because I used some cheap craft paint for a background for a page and I’m utterly underwhelmed by how thin the paint is and also how much paint it took to cover the paper.
I’m finding that one has to strike a fine balance. Watching art journaling and mixed media technique videos on youtube can be inspiring, but it can also be intimidating. It can show me techniques and make me want to try things I’ve never even thought of before, but looking at other people’s amazing art has a tendency to make me too critical of mine, I think. Tonight it just feels like nothing is going right.
I started this collage tonight. It ended up being a response to a prompt at A Year in the Life of an Art Journal, although when I started the first layer of this collage, I didn’t intend it to be one. The prompt was “summertime”. It’s not completely finished. I’m going to add some words to it, I think, but I really like it so far.
I shared this page with you guys when I did the background. I finally finished it, and I like the way it turned out, so I thought you guys might like to see the finished pages.
I got a bunch of new stuff today. My Golden gesso and Prismacolor colored pencils came from Amazon. I got a bunch of stamps and some distress ink in wild honey and some pink ink and also some K and Company embellishments and some watercolors. The Golden gesso and Prismacolor pencils are SO worth the money. I gessoed six pages with the Golden earlier, and it’s SO smooth and lovely. I’ve been watching art journal videos on youtube and playing around in my journal. I’ll have to take some pictures of the stuff I’ve been playing around with soon.
“A few cards and letters
And one long distance call
We drifted away like
the leaves in the
fall.”
Deana Carter
A collage with distress ink and acrylic paint on it.
A work in progress. I experimented with my new glimmer mist.
While I was in the shower just now, I realized something. Whenever it feels like my creative gremlins have come out to gang up on me and make me feel like I will never be able to make anything again, it’s not really about being in a creative slump. Often, I have discovered, it’s about the fact that I’m avoiding dealing with something I should be dealing with. Because, if my journal is what I tell myself it is, meaning if it really is a place where anything goes, then the bad stuff needs to go in it, too. Part of the problem, I think, is that I have trouble really believing that the things I create don’t have to be pretty. If I’m dealing with the negative things in my life, I don’t think that the pages that result out of them should necessarily be “pretty” because then that doesn’t feel honest, but I have a hard time purposely making pages that aren’t pretty.
Hmm. A dilemma I don’t have an answer for.
Steel Magnolias & Sweet Tea 