A Few Art Journal Pages

I do love the freedom of "art journaling" - that I am creating something to experiment with techniques and doing it for my own gratification. Occasionally I worry that someone else won't think my work is up to snuff but I fight those feelings very stongly.

I am completely in awe of those people who manage to complete a page every day. In five years I might have finished thirty pages, but probably not. These are some of my latest. The three ladies with flowers must have been something I saw that inspired me. I got all of the backgrounds painted and all of the women pasted on in May 2011 when I did the "garden of dreams" page. And then the "gardeners dream bigger dreams" page got finished sometime in 2012. But the last woman left me wondering what she was thinking so hard about. I tried "pensive"and "contemplative" but she didn't tell me anything. I wanted flowers to match her mood but couldn't find any except on some old chintz. They were too big so I painted a few of them. And then I decided she was just sad and these song lyrics came to mind. The most worrisome thing is that there is another page ready that I'm drawing a blank on also.

The bird page was just a hoot. While my sister was here, one of the things I worked on a bit was a tag book of bird songs, i.e., songs that referenced birds. I had a bunch of stamped pieces lying around from that. Kate made a card for her daughter by using a very thin paste and piling scraps onto muslin and I wanted to try that but in my moleskine rather than on muslin. I loved how colorful it turned out, added more color plus the tree branch to make all of the images work together and found a perfect quote. I love it!!