Christmas traditions

As a grandmother, there is one thing I'm excited about this Christmas. In five days, I'm going to meet my grandson, James for the first time. He will be three months old on Monday. I also will be seeing Abigail for the third time. Ironically, Don's first wife, Lynn, is also seeing one of her grandchildren (the same two kids) for the third time, as we will be in Colorado together. In her case, however, that would be James. She was there when James was born and the family visited her for Thanksgiving.

That being said, I am not totally into the Christmas spirit yet. For a number of reasons. However, I am keeping focused on Jesus, the real reason for the season. And I'm enjoying two of our Christmas traditions, which are listening to carols on the stereo and making Christmas cards. Music is Don's passion year round, paper crafts of many kinds are mine. We enjoy incorporating these passions into one of the most important holidays of the year. 

My Christmas cards, posted second, all look pretty much like the second of the two images I'm sharing today. It's so subtle I don't even know if Don is noticing it as he signs the cards, but the cards do reflect our love of music, as the fronts are embossed with music notes and clefts. (Thanks to a Christmas gift a few years ago from Holly, a very sweet stepdaughter.)  If I didn't snail mail you one of these cards, consider this online version my wish for you. 

And if you are one of the people viewing this blog because you're interested in my art journal pages, I hope you enjoy how my Christmas card inspired an art journal page, the top image. The journaling mentions our two favorite traditions, but also scratches the surface of why I'm not feeling highly Christmas spirited this year. You can't read it, because the photo cut too much off for it to make sense. 

But in both this entry, and this one, you can see how I incorporate journaling into "art." Since journaling has always kind of been my "signature" on scrapbook pages, I can see pages like these being my style in art journaling too. Not my signature, because most of my art journal pages don't have this much. But I am very happy with the ones that do.

I like giveaways

I haven't used chipboard in awhile on my scrapbook pages, and I don't think I ever have in my art journal. But this stuff is pretty. So if you're a paper artist, check out this blog's giveaway drawing!

http://bluefernstudios.blogspot.com/2012/12/our-first-giveaway.html

Circles of art and more circles of art

Sometimes you just have to make art for art's sake. And sometimes, even that isn't going to last long. When I posted my background of doodled circles last time I wrote on this blog, I knew I wasn't happy with the finished product. And so, it has been revised. It used to say "I will run." I am still running, in fact have been in a new 5K race since then, ran Nov. 11 in 42:33. 

Now it says "I will believe." The theme of the whole book is "I will believe." I mean, that's what this book is telling me. Believe me, art journals speak to their creators. Or maybe it's God speaking to us through our own artwork. I titled "this book "Dream" and yet more than once, when creating the "journaling" aspect of the pages, I've heard a still small voice tell me "just believe." There's even a page from awhile back that addresses that this book should have been titled "Believe," not dream.

Except that for three weeks, a Pea at Two Peas in A Bucket was posting art journal challenges there, I have to give Tammy Garcia, a serious art journalist who publishes the blog Daisy Yellow, credit for almost all of my art journal ideas. (She also had a challenge one time to read crafty books, so I will say that when participating in that challenge, the book rather than Daisy Yellow inspired about 10 new things on my art journal pages. But for the most part, three sections of the Daisy Yellow blog have inspired my work. The first was "Jump Start Your Art Journal" which was a series of prompts I used for the first three or four months I was working on this art journal to jump into this concept. 

The second series of prompts I have been using were called "Daily Paper Prompts." Tammy posted these back in August and September, but since I was working on the "Jump Start" prompts then, I didn't get started on them until late September, and I am only now nearly caught up. It helps that my lovely chains of circles were inspired by several of the Daily Paper Prompts, and also one of Tammy's blog posts that don't fit into any of her inspiration series.  If you are a follower of Tammy's, and are familiar with the Daily Paper Prompts, note that the page in question (the one on the bottom of the above photo) is inspired by DPP 16 (Pattern), DPP 43 (Circles), DPP 47 (Stamping Circles) and DPP 57 (One Word). It was also inspired by one of the three Two Peas challenges, at least in its original form, and by Tammy's Nov. 14 post "Just A Little Black Paint."

I am doing all of my pages as single-page illustrations, but in a bound sketching book from the Jurupa Valley Michael's. Sometimes, the facing pages make an impact. In the case of the page facing my "Believe" page, in real life, that page has made more of an impact on the facing page than the other way around. The blue paint I used to stamp circles with bled quite a bit over to the other page, so they share that blue paint now.

But since the book will not lay flat, in every picture I took of my "Believe" page, it is overshadowed by the page with a door. That page also is inspired by several of Tammy's blog posts, but right now I can't figure out which ones.

An ongoing series of inspirations that Tammy posts every Friday are her No-Frills Prompts. These prompts begin with a photo that illustrates some design concept. For me, the photos and prompts usually inspire some simple art journal creation, like a drawing. She had put these on hiatus earlier this fall, but resumed them two Fridays ago. I joined in on the fun then. 

Last week, the photo was of bottles of Coke, and the emphasis was "repetition." I drew several versions of a new part of Diet Coke's logos, which is a red square with a polar bear in it. I am not real eager to share my attempt at drawing polar bears, so that project will likely become the background for something else soon, and once it looks better, might be shared here. 

I was happier with my results of this week's prompts, which was of gelato ice cream and calls "flavor" a design concept. One way Tammy suggested we illustrate "flavor" is to use circles to contain different colors. She also suggested diagramming the perfect ice cream sundae.

OK, the perfect ice cream sundae is any ice cream sundae I can create with one of my favorite rubber stamps. It's from a set of stamps I picked up in the dollar section of the Target on Tyler in 2005, right after I had moved to Riverside. While the balloon and cupcake stamps I picked up at the same time as this one probably get more use, I do also like this one. And it made the perfect sundaes for this exercise, along with markers to create and color the circles and color the "glass" cups these sundaes sit in, a fancy lead pencil for coloring in the spoons (the pencil is also one of my favorite drawing tools), and Stickles for coloring the ice cream. This one may stay just the way it is, but in this journal, any page could change at any given time. Believe me.

Thankful for a few things

Some of my friends did projects in November, not necessarily on paper, listing 30 things they were thankful for. I did not. I must confess, it's hard for me to have an attitude of gratitude these days. Yet I recently came across a new-to-me art journal blog, A Year In the Life of An Art Journal  It lists 26 very detailed prompts each year and invites readers to use these to create their own art journal pages. And on Nov. 30 (seen by me yesterday) it suggested that anyone who did not do the "30 Days of Gratitude" project list at least one thing for which they were thankful. Both the host of this blog and one of her designers did that, then wrote some variation of the word "thankful" across their journaling, but in their case, white pages, black journaling and their variations of  "thankful" painted in blue.

The first blank page in my book was the one to the left of the tree, also shown here. When I came across this blog last week, I started with the prompt posted Nov. 15 and started working my way back. One of the October prompts was to "use leaves" and write about how you know it's really fall. This actually isn't all that easy to tell in southern California. But after finishing this page, it turns out I actually had done similar journaling a month ago, when I was sitting in Starbucks drinking the first hot drink of the season. (It is strictly iced in summer here!) I'll show you that one, but first let me tell you the five things I ended up being thankful for yesterday, and also a little bit about how I made both of these pages for those interested.

My five things:
1. On Nov. 30, I went on a job interview that looks promising.
2. On Thanksgiving Day, and the day after, we spent time with Don's family.
3. On the day after Thanksgiving, we also got to visit Newport Beach where my cousin was staying with her husband's family. We celebrated her older son's third birthday, and were the only representatives of her family there, because the boy gets to have another party later up north with my aunt, uncle and other 2 cousins.
4. Colder weather is here.
5. On Nov. 11, I ran the Mission Inn 5K and shaved more than 20 seconds from my previous 5K time.

On the "fall is here" page, I started by using my brown mist, and one of the tree masks I bought with the first bottle of this mist I had. I then journaled about the difficulty of knowing when it's fall here. I guess you can, at first, say it's fall when it drops below 90 degrees most days and you are drinking iced pumpkin spice lattes because even though it's October it's still too warm for the hot drinks. Football season has arrived, and baseball season is wrapping up. A few trees change the color of leaves that eventually then drop, although most here just stay green. After journaling, I inked the page with two colors of ink, Adirondack Brown and Tim Holtz Distress Ink Walnut Stain.

Some of that brown ink made its way over to the left side of the book, so if I wanted to use that page, it had to incorporate brown as well. The journaling prompt immediately prior to the "fall" page also was a monochromatic brown page, so I decided to fit one more all-brown page in between. I journaled the five things I'm thankful for, then misted over that, and added more ink.

But in between these two pages, I looked back in my book and came across these I had done near the end of October. I had written, at the top of the page on the left "In October, you wake up one day and it's cloudy or even misting. It's not going to get hot today!! You can wear pants, or maybe even long sleeves.  It won't get cold here, but summer is finally over!" Oh, that was perfect journaling for the prompt that hadn't even been posted then! Especially since I was following prompts on Daisy Yellow to journal while drinking coffee (my first hot Starbucks of the season), and create a page in shades of tan, brown and copper. (I also was exploring drawing mandalas at that time, but I'm not sure I like those.)

I decided I needed to use the part of the Year in the Life of An Art Journal prompt to use leaves. So I did kind of the opposite of what I do with my masks. I had the reverse image of a leaf die cut, so I positioned it on the page three times and sprayed it with mist. I imagine I will just keep the reverse image in a stash so I can color more leaves in this way in the future. But I really liked the effect on the color of the formerly purple reverse image. I remembered I had bought this brown mist for, and also first used the red mist on, a layout about  our wine-drinking experience at the 2012 Los Angeles County Fair. Since that's the end of September, and "fall" had not really arrived in southern California, I was wearing my lavender shorts outfit that day, but had used the "fallish" wine-themed embellishments that were in my stash.  See?  (Scroll down to the bottom two pages of the "Keeping Busy" entry.) The leaf, both its positive and reverse images, had been in my stash forever. But the positive image, now sprayed with both brown and red mist, has now found a home on the wine page. I love that my art journaling has helped improve a scrapbook page, but that wasn't the first time that happened.