31 Days Has December…

It’s been about a week since I blogged last. I got sick with either whopping allergies or a cold two days before Thanksgiving.  Cleaning the house, preparing the feast, and then cleaning everything up afterward took a toll on my energy and I am finally beginning to feel myself again.  And just in time too!

December is here and it has 31 days in which to create.  The late fall is full of fun and a flurry of family activities. One of the activities I decided to do this year is to keep a holiday art journal.  I feel no pressure to work in it every day or to finish a page each day, but I do want to get in the holiday mood and sustain some form of creativity for the next 4 weeks.  I plan to loosely follow prompts given in a free “12.31” holiday journal workshop sponsored by Dawn DeVries Sokol, the same person who does NaNoJouMo during November.  If you’re interested you can find it here:  http://www.dawnsokol.com/1231/ .

I decided to create my own journal out of cereal and cracker boxes using a technique that Dawn teaches in a workshop on Creativebug.com .  I used two cereal boxes, two cracker boxes, a greeting card and four pieces of heavy scrapbook paper/cardstock.  I will gesso and paint or otherwise decorate each page as I use it.  Yesterday (December 1st) I started putting the journal together and today I finished the journal and decorated the cover for it.

You can see that the boxes, cards, and papers I used are different sizes.  That’s A-okay for what I will be doing.  I’m happy to re-cycle items I would otherwise throw out.

Along the right edge I deckle-cut each of the boxes to give them a little more interest.

After binding all of the pages together with a needle and twine, I covered the outside spine in decorative duct tape.  I decorated the cover page with gesso, Dylusions sprays, Posca paint pens and a white gel pen.  The two snow-people are made from circles that I had painted as an exercise in a watercolor workshop a few months ago.  I kept those exercise papers just in case I wanted to use bits and pieces as collage in my art journal.  Again, re-use & recycle.

I have no idea what this journal will look like at the end of December, but I’m pretty sure I will have fun working in it.  I hope you also find something fun and creative to do during this last month of 2014!

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Art Every Day Month – Day 17

I looked at the NaNoJouMo song-title prompt today (“Lightning Bolt” by Jake Bugg) and decided I could do a small art journal page in less than 30 minutes.  And I did.

I used spray inks and Distress stains to create this.  The most difficult part was cutting the card stock masks to keep the spray inks where I wanted them.  I finished up by writing and drawing the stick figure and the bare tree with a black Fude pen.  The words along the slope are from a line in the song: “In the path of a lightning bolt”.

This took 20 minutes which is all I wanted to spend on art this morning since I have other, more pressing creative and non-creative things to do today.  I hope you can spend at least 20 minutes being creative today too!

How to get Passion into your life (and I’m not necessarily talking about S.E.X.)

Ha ha!  I bet some of you were drawn here just by the title of my blog post.  Well, that’s fine.  But this post is really about ME: what I want for my own life, what I seek to bring into my life, how I keep my passion for life alive.  And it’s all condensed in a 2-page art journal post.

Journal52, Week 23, Passion (Acrylics and Dylusions sprays, TCW and StencilGirl stencils, magazine cutouts/collage).