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.
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