Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The rain...just enough

When  I wrote my last blog entry about the rainbow six days ago, it was raining. It was the last of several rainy days we had/will have in January. 


It was also raining on Jan. 12 when I posted this entry about how several times, Segunda has posed under wet umbrellas when we come in from the rain, and how she likes the blue and white toys we got her this Christmas. Random thoughts that come up when an art journalist (Daisy Yellow 6ix2) prompts you to journal about raindrops and treasure.

Today, it is not raining and there is no more rain in the 10-day forecast. Since this is southern California, it's hard to know when we might have more rain.  So, I can't do the photo prompt posted today at A Year in The Life of An Art Journal, which is to shoot a mug (teacup or ????) in front of a rainy window. But I can do the journaling prompt, which is to share a little bit about what the perfect rainy day looks like to me. The prompt also called for dripping acrylic paint down a page, and my thinned blue acrylic paint is certainly very good at doing that.

My thoughts about the rain are that the amount on neither side of Cajon Pass is perfect, although rain in southern California is definitely more tolerable than elsewhere.

On the north side of Cajon Pass where I used to live, it's the Mojave Desert and there is not enough. Any rainfall there is welcomed, because it will be so little it doesn't even bother anyone. And here on the south side, we sometimes have so much rain it's annoying and inconvenient. Yet if we don't have that much rain, we don't have the pleasant green hills we are enjoying at this time.

Although the hills have become green, I would classify the 2013 rainy days as only minorly annoying and inconvenient. I and others have had to cancel or modify running and other outdoor exercise plans, but the rain has not been the type to cause property damage. But that does happens sometimes here. I remember in January 2005 it raining so hard they had to shut March Air Force Base down to visitors until they could sandbag the place, and I remember in I think December 2010 it being so rainy here at the house, water was coming in through the under-sink cupboard in our house. Don, being already unemployed, had managed to spend so much of our money we could not afford to buy dirt for the 10 empty sandbags the Rubidoux CSD had provided each of its households to help with the storm.

Thankfully, we have figured out that even on a limited income, saving for emergencies is a good idea - and that we have not had a weather-related one in awhile.

There may be two reasons, why I am thinking about the desert. First of all, the 6ix prompt for Week 5, posted yesterday, includes "cactus" and bloom. And that had me reaching for a photo I took in 2011 at Joshua Tree National Park of cactus blooms. I am not finished with that one, it will be my second two-page art journal creation and I will post it either Friday or on the weekend.


 But then there is this page, which I did in response to a Two Peas prompt earlier this month. It reminds me of the desert too. It wanted the colors tan and grey, acrylic paint, distress ink and bubble wrap (which is great for stamping a dotted background), And it's the page opposite the "Cat in the Rain" page. I had always hated this page, and knew when I posted it to Two Peas that it would probably get recycled before I finished putting new creations into Art Journal #1. (We're getting very close to the start of Art Journal #2, probably sometime in February.) In fact, within days of posting it, I clipped a scripture about "treasure" from my church bulletin and pasted it down on this page.

 This is how the spread looks now. "Cat in the Rain" has also been somewhat modified since I posted it here. Those little treasures would not stay on the page, so I left two off and finally pop-dotted one on, to give it a stronger hold than glue.

Also, you should know that  "Cat in the Rain" is one of three pages I accidentally created with the book upside down. Although it appears to be near the front of the book, it's actually near the end. And that means that its predecessor, the formerly desert neutral page with the bubble wrap polka dots, was boosted up in the book by all of the pages I had done before it. This means what little bit of acrylic paint I put on the left side dripped not down the page, but onto the crease of the book, thankfully only at the top where I had already covered the page in blue.


What you cannot see well, even in this closeup shot, is that a little bit of the old blue paint from the next page brushed off onto what is now the bottomof this page, and a little bit of the light blue water color pencil, from the project on the opposite side of this sheet of paper, bleeds through at the lower right of the area inside the black frame. These are those "happy accidents" that permeate my art journal. I call them "happy" because more often than not, they create some kind of unintended effect that I actually like. This is one of those times. With two shades of blue specks, it was a prettier page.

To not cover up too much of that, I ended up turning my new journal creation on its side, which is actually how it had been to begin with. This means my blue paint drips now spread across the page like sky. I also added some green ink, symbolic of how the open spaces in my neighborhood have a bit of green from the rains now. The 2013 rains have been just enough.

But I thought the scripture clipping still looked better on this page than the other one.

5 comments:

  1. This is adorable I love your take on the prompt!!

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  2. Oh your cat is a sweetie and I love that story about her and the wet umbrella, and how it inspired your journal page.

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  3. What a cool page! So creative to add a kitty w/ an umbrella :) Love!

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