Journaling with art

This page sums up what my art journal, and most of the five pages I have completed so far are all about.

To Don's delight, my first project in my new venture focuses on our favorite songs.

I am not sure how today's art journal project will end up.

As many of you know, I am a writer by profession, and probably always will be to some degree. As most of you probably also know, I have been a scrapbooker for about a decade. I now have more than a decade worth of scrapbook pages, following a decision I made in 2001 that my photos deserved better treatment than to simply be stuck in a photo album.

In 2001, I believed a prevailing thought that "something better" for photos was 12 x 12 scrapbooks, and the cardstock a few companies were making to use with them. Patterned paper could also be added, although in 2001, most of it was sold at an 8.5 x 11 size. Stickers could - and should - also be added, in the very same theme of your photos.

In 2001 the paper arts world was getting away from this simple treatment, I soon learned. Brads, eyelets, stamped images and so much more became popular on pages. But having "grown up" back in the days when a newspaper page was a paper craft unto itself (that is, before the newspapers I worked for invested in the computer technology to do it digitally), I resisted doing more than photos, journaling and adding some color and other interest with paper and stickers.

Eventually a class at my then-local, then in business scrapbook store (RIP Scrapbook Story of Victorville), got me over that hurdle. The website Two Peas in a Bucket. com was also a guiding force in my development as a scrapbooker. Through it, I have always known what the latest scrapbooking and other artistic trends are. (For instance hexagons are in this year! That would explain why Sandals Church keeps using them on the bulletins and videos for the MOVE series!) I have also found the inspiration to use these new ideas on my scrapbooking and cardmaking projects. Don's Valentine had hexagons on it.

Two Peas, for so many years, had challenges that kept me motivated to do new scrapbooking projects on almost a daily basis. Of course, with a full-time job, I really couldn't quite do a scrapbook page a day, but I tried. And since 2009 when I got my digital camera, I usually had a whole bunch of photos that NEEDED to be scrapbooked. Not always, but when I didn't there was always a Two Peas challenge or two to motivate me. And if not on Two Peas, I could usually find one somewhere else.

Lately that has not been the case. Challenges I had been doing for years on Two Peas have either disappeared or been scaled way back, as their hosts have been off to new ventures. And for whatever reason, the projects "somewhere else" don't always captivate me.

Of course, lately, it has been easy for me to work on something creative almost every day. I am essentially unemployed, except that I have been blessed to find one freelance writing project, so I can still call myself a professional writer. I'm also very hamstrung in my efforts to find a new job. I'm now over 50 (49 most of the time of this job search), Don and I only have one car, and if I take the car to go to networking events, Don will use that as an excuse to stay at home. The primary networking group I want to attend is at the same time Don needs to be at school.

It seems, after a few months of therapy to deal with all this, letting go of my dreams and accepting the life I have for what is good about it is the best approach. My therapy also recommends that I process the negative feelings I have about it by journaling. Which I do. At least five minutes a day. I also journal, in a sense, on these two blogs I maintain.

But although Two Peas as a whole seems to be in a bit of an artistic rut, I have to credit a recent post about art journals for pulling my creativity in a new direction. Art journals are not a new thing. I think they have been around for a long time, like scrapbooking had been when it became such a popular hobby in the 1990s. Art journaling has also been a popular hobby for at least a few years now, but I always looked at it as something for ARTISTS, not JOURNALISTS. Even one previous attempt at art journaling left me shaking my head, as those entries were not artistic.

But the recent Two Peas post led me to discover a new website, all about art journaling. The website is called Daisy Yellow. Looking around there last week, I discovered approximately 90 ideas for making very creative pages. I wanted to do this ! Helping matters a great deal, the first two ideas were to make an art journal page with circles, and to make an art journal page about your favorite music album. I opted instead to make a page, with circles. I mean, we are so into music circles here, I first wrote "your favorite record album" before remembering I am quite possibly the only art journal artist who would automatically think of records when thinking of music albums. I opted to do my first art journal page about our song rating project.

Since then, I have done 4 more pages, and a sixth is in progress. Daisy Yellow is a blog, and today is beginning a project called The Creativity Queue Challenge. The challenge is that on the eight days it is running, we will post about any creative things we have done. And that's why I'm posting about my art journal here today.

I'm working with one of her Kick Start Your Art Journal prompts, as I most likely will be for awhile. This prompt encourages us to start by painting a yellow background with various yellow paints. Instead, I have used my one yellow paint, my one yellow water pencil and my one tin of yellow stamping ink to create a new background. The challenge says to add gift wrap and then journal on white cardstock about what yellow means to me, which I probably will do later today. Also, having read another participants' blog entry about making her own stamps, I am inspired to add images created by one of the hundred or so stamps I already own to this project. After I finish it, I may then start on a second art journal page, or I may save that for another day.

First, as soon as this blog entry is finished, I am going to go for a run.

Oh, I did one more creative, artsy thing today too and it's kind of related. Thinking about yellow last weekend, when I first typed the list of the Kick Start Your Art Journal prompts, I noticed my neighbors have yellow roses blooming in front of their lemon tree. What a contrast of yellow plants! I decided then it would make a good photograph, and today I photographed them. I only took a few shots and will not develop them until the roll is done (I'm thinking after Easter?), but I'll be glad to share my photo with you then. Until then, enjoy my new art projects.