Give it your all

I enjoy running, and belong to a running club. Consequently I receive a magazine with all kinds of advice about running. While it may have been helpful, I loved the images of runners within for a much different reason. They make fantastic additions to my art journaling.

My latest contribution to the Index Card A Day Challenge combines both interests. Because whether it's running the streets, running my business or art journaling, I am interested in transforming potential into performance.

These runners are in the 1976 Olympic Marathon  I have never run a marathon, nor has 75 percent of the membership of my running club. The 25 percent that has run them would be lucky to finish around 3 hours and 20 minutes. The best of these runners probably finished in more like 2 hours and 20 minutes. So, while they aren't sprinters, they, like all Olympic runners, were designed for speed. They definitely run with everything they've got.  But then so do my marathoner friends, and I'd like to think that I do when I run a 5K. And I would like to think I give all that I have to other things I do,  although I know in some areas, that's not ture.

But whatever I do it's good advice. For me, and for you. Once you realize that you need to do what you were designed for, and you give that everything you've got, your winning season starts now. So make he most of every advantage, and go run.

Art journaling is probably not what I'm designed for, but when an idea comes together, I will run with it. This idea is "found poetry,"  which is collecting words and phrases from a magazine and assembling them into some kind of poem. If you squint at the blurry lines, you see my poem says what I've said here. Not a bad found poem!

San Diego, more ICADs and one full-size journal page

One place I have enjoyed visiting on a more than annual basis since moving not too far away is San Diego, California. During the two years my cousin lived just west of there in Coronado - and especially in the year my aunt and uncle were there too, we visited more than once a year.  But now they have both moved - my aunt and uncle back to Exeter, and the kids to Nebraska.  As of today, I haven't been back down south since then. In fact, it has been almost a year. Since Wesley's birthday was celebrated in Orange County in 2012, it was Bradley's first birthday that we last visited San Diego. 

But soon, Don and I will be headed south - almost that far. My brother is getting married at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas on July 4. We don't know about anyone else, as my parents' hotel is considerably farther away, but our hotel is the Day's Inn a few blocks from this same beach.

And so, I had to make an index card celebrating the past visits to San Diego, and the near future visit to, um, San Diego County.

 

I am glad that even though we are in poverty, we can go to the beach. I did a real art journal page about where I would go if I were rich instead. This one was prompted by A Year in the Life of An Art Journal, but it was fun to give that some thought. If i were rich, instead of the beaches of southern and central California, and the fun/work trips we make to Hollywood on a regular basis, I would fly somewhere. It would probably still be to a beach, but far enough away no one could come there and say hi to me. So probably, some deserted tropical island.

The topic of "city or map," one of the prompts for the ICADs last week, inspired this creation. This is my own little part of southern California, specifically the area between my condo and the City Council chambers.  Don and I, along with a Cal Poly student who was on the "planning" project Cal Poly had volunteered to help the city with, drew a similar but larger map on June 4 (minus the cute sun.) Then on June 6 the Cal Poly students presented a much more polished presentation to the City Council. Our city is supposed to be working on a general plan, but it of course, doesn't have the money to do so. So, it's working with a non-profit organization (Reach Out), Cal Poly Pomona and many residents to get some of the ground work done by very unconventional means.

 

These are a few more ICADs I've made in the past week or so, following prompts at Daisy Yellow.

My princesses

For days 4 and 5 of the ICAD (Index Card A Day) challenge, I focused on my granddaughter's love of princesses, and specifically, a conversation Holly and I had in which she was trying to convince Abigail that princesses wear pants. Well, at least Jasmine does. It was also noted by someone else on facebook that Ariel wears a similar outfit, but fins. Then when "crown" came up as one of the prompts on ICAD, and a couple of other ICAD posters followed their own beat and drew their own mermaids, I decided I could draw both Jasmine and Ariel to represent the "crown" prompt.

ICAD 2

My ICAD  (see http://daisyyellow.squarespace.com/icad/) for Day 2 is more technique-focused than most of them will be. It also is one that took a more convulted path to its own inspiration.

First, the technique. I found it at http://artangeloriginalart.blogspot.com/2010/11/mixed-media-crumpled-tissue-technique.html. This is a new blog for me to discover featuring a talented artist named Angie. Not sure what her last name is. She has the perfect description of this technique there, so I won't post it all over again on my blog.

But that's not where I originally found the inspiration.Although every art journal (and now ICAD) of mine is inspired by some sort of prompt this ICAD mimics an art journal page that was inspired by three different blogs.

First, I am going back into the archives of Emily Falconbridge's Life Is Art, which inspired a similar artistic journey into minatures back in 2007 when I did the Deck of Me. I'm not going quite that far back though. This link is to Week 26 of her "52 Questions," which is a year of artistic prompts she blogged iin 2009. The question that week was interesting "What would you write on your walls?" I think she had a guest blogger that week who didn't own her own home, so she wasn't free to do with her walls as she pleased. I am, but most of my walls are covered with furniture, photos, wall hangings, etc. Don is a hoarder  likes a lot of stuff, so for that and other reasons, it's best we leave our walls plain white.

So, although inspired by that prompt, I took scrapbook paper that looked like old kitchen wallpaper, glued it to my art journal and then wrote about the wallpapers we had in my childhood home, and also about the wallpapering-paneling project my first husband and I had planned but never got around to.

Then I found the current (May 30) prompt on A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. Interestingly enough, that prompt is also about walls, in this case the kind you put up yourself, even if you've never built a home. (It kind of reminds me of a column I wrote when I was 24 about accidentally kicking a hole in my cheap apartment wall, but wanting to tear walls of hostility completely down.) I don't think I have walls of hostility in my life right now, but there are other psychological walls I could, but would rather not, write a book about. It was this blog's host, Rachel Whetzel, who recommended the crumpled tissue paper technique listed above, as a way of creating texture on a paper "wall." And so, I added that to my wallpaper journaling. I wasn't sure what I was going to add on top of that though.

Until the next day, when Tammy Garcia at Daisy Yellow jumped the gun on her ICAD Challenge, and posted a whole bunch of prompts a day early. Some of the one-word prompts she posted to inspire us this first week in June are repurpose (which I am doing with the tissue paper, which was originally purchased around Christmas to help with gift wrapping), wallpaper (WOW) and paisley. Just so happens my "wallpaper" scrapbook paper came in a pad from Target (years ago) that also had a paisley pattern. Perfect! Oh and there's one more on Daisy Yellow's list, calligraphy. I don't really no how to do that, so I wrote fancy writing. The art journal page explains how my house and walls are too chaotic to be anything but white. The ICAD used the same papers, same mist and same crayon, and the same journaling pen - but to simply say ICAD 2013. Although this is Day 2, it will be the cover for my (hopefully) 61 ICADS when wer're done.

I can ICAD

Daisy Yellow  (Tammy Garcia) has her fellow art journalists keeping busy. In 2013, she usually gives us one prompt with six items, and challenges us to use all six in a single art journal creation. But in June and July, she's giving us weekly prompts, and a list of eight other prompts each week, which we can use daily. And she has no expectation that we will use any of them, as the challenge is simply to create art every day. Oh, there is one more catch. It needs to be on an index card. Thus it is ICAD, or Index Card A Day.

Here is the full story. You will have to scroll down through at all the ICAD entries to see the prompts, but right now as I write this, there's only one day of ICAD entries.

And here is my first ICAD. I actually followed three of the "daily" prompts (zebra, Candyland and faux stitching) and the weekly prompt to use colors of the rainbow.

I was also inspired by this very simple piece of artwork I found on Pinterest.

I have ideas for two more ICADS, and I have intentions to add one a day to this blog, with hopes I can continue after that. The reason is that each of my next two prompts are inspired by items on the daily list, but each also by other artwork, in these cases, some of my own recent art journal creations that I have not shared yet. So, to fully share my creative process, I plan to blog.

Celebrating yesterday with art

Yes, there are country roads outside of  Los Angeles if you look long enough. This blog and picture celebrate my reasons for being on one of them on May 9, 2013.

First of all, I want to tell you more about the picture above. I drew it. It's a leaf and a country road, with "drops" of rain coming down in ink and haiku poem that states "Liglhtly falling rain - while leaving Los Angeles - on a long country road." Some of it was inspired by Prompt 6ix 19 at one of my favorite art journaling websites, daisyyellow.com. Some of it is inspired by what I did yesterday, which is seal a deal with my new businesses' fourth client. I will explain how the two tie together, and why the poem even makes sense, more towards the end.

The name of my new client is 24 Carrots, a catering company and restaurants in Irvine. (I was talking to the owner and writing for three other business owners before the business became official on Monday.)

I haven't been scrapbooking much lately. It's partly because, after I had all of my photos finished for 2012, I just hit a creative wall. It's partly because after I had all my photos finished for 2012, my wallet also hit a creative wall, and lost its ability to generate the random amounts of cash I "need" for more scrapbook supplies. It's partly because my financial situation is, or at least was, a whole lot more serious than that joke.

But for maybe the past week, I've had a happier reason. I decided at the end of April that the time had come to start Pen Porter, the business I have thought about starting for almost 10 years. So, as of May 6, my business is now official! What I do is public relations, and for the most part that means helping my clients get stories published about them in various southern California media outlets.

I won't be saying too much more about Pen Porter on this blog, most likely. This blog is about family and some of my hobbies. My business and my hobbies, especially my paper crafting hobbies, don't usually mix. There's a little more crossover between business and my love of cooking, but cooking has its own blog that I maintain even more poorly than this one.

Besides, at the end of April, I started two more blogs that are more related to my business. I started  them both while in class at University of California-Riverside Extension. That's possible because my class at UCR is social media. One of the blogs is to be used for class assignments. I believe I first started the other one, and for some reason decided something had to be changed on it, which I at least at the time couldn't figure out how to change. So I started a second one, and began using it for class assignments.

But I'm really quite happy with the first one, so it has become the blog I will use to tell the world what is going on with Pen Porter. And that's the blog that will probably get most of my blogging time focus for the forseeable future.

I suppose, once class is done, I will use my other new blog to tell the world more general stuff about public relations, as that's the topic I'm an expert in. But probably only if I don't feel more like blogging about paper arts or cooking, which I'm also pretty good at too.

Which brings us back to this paper art. We had to go to Irvine to meet with the owner of 24 Carrots. We were done with the meeting at 4:30 p.m. Although you generally go places in Southern California by taking the freeways, the ones leading directly from Orange County to Riverside aren't the best place to be that close to 5 p.m. So we started out our trip in search of alternatives.

A freeway you want to avoid like death during the rush hour is California State Highway 91. It's evil! It also is the most direct way to get from Irvine to Riverside.

However, Jurupa Valley is north of Riverside. The 60 Freeway runs through Jurupa Valley, and the 91 does not. So, even for someone like me who lives at the very south end of Jurupa Valley, the 60 Freeway can be a logical alternative. We've done that more than a few times coming home from Orange County. We also frequently use this freeway to get back from Los Angeles, as it is more direct. The 60 Freeway starts in Los Angeles, so it's a straight shot to Jurupa Valley, although it too sometimes must be avoided in the Los Angeles area because of excessive traffic there. It literally is faster to take surface streets.

However, to get to the 60 Freeway from Orange County, you have to go north quite a ways. This normally can be done on Interstate 5 and the 57 Freeway, which aren't evil like the 91 Freeway. But they still aren't much fun during rush hour. Several times during our trip, we decided there was too much traffic heading in the direction of the freeway, and pressed on with roads that avoided it.

At one point (in Brea), we stopped for dinner. While we wer there a quick, but hard downpour made everything wet. You don't see too much of that this late in the year, but we've had rain several times earlier this month. I think there is a rule that it has to rain in May, but that's a whole nother story.

When we were in Brea, we were already so far north that we were on the same streets (Lambert, Brea and Brea Canyon) that we had been on less than a month ago after a trip home from Los Angeles. We had left Los Angeles at 5:15 and were supposed to be back home that night for a 7 p.m. meeting, but we were about a half hour late. It would have been worse on the 60 Freeway.

When we went from Los Angeles, we had decided to get on the 57 Freeway from one of the exits off Brea Canyon Road, then we took the 60 to Jurupa Valley. But this time, the 57 still had too much traffic, so we kept pressing on the side streets.

By the time we got to any streets we could have taken directly up to the 60, I had figured out that one of the streets turns to another street, and that street would have taken us so close to home there wasn't any point on getting on the 60 Freeway. Although the 60's traffic was probably OK, we decided to take the road anyhow.

And we are glad we did. Because after lots of driving through suburban Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, that last road on the map became a country road. With scattered farmhouses and lots and lots of cows! Having grown up on a farm, I love cows! But I don't usually expect to see them on drives home from Los Angeles, or Irvine!

And so, I came home thinking about the rain, the cows, and how the road we were on is also a way home from the second largest city in the United States. We had made it all the way home from Irvine without touching the freeways, and could have done the same from Los Angeles. That's something to celebrate in itself, and so I made art to do exactly that.

Christmas in Colorado

I'm still working away on an exciting week, the week we spent with the grandkids. I can't file that into "the past" until I have it scrapbooked, even if it is taking me three months to get everything scrapbooked. I will move on, I will catch up, in part because when I get to the 2013 photos I'll be taking a new and a little faster approach. But for now, enjoy my creativity.