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.