New Year, New Focus

With this being a new year, I am starting a whole new chapter in my blog as well in most parts of my life.   Instead of resolutions in the traditional sense, I chose a word for my year:  MOVE.  Very appropriate to what I've just gone through (i.e. had my hip replaced, so am now able to walk and MOVE around in my life with more ease and no pain!), and am continuing to put in place.  


I do have some "intentions" which to me are stronger than resolutions and go deeper also.  One of them is to journal every day or nearly every day - both in writing (in the form of morning pages) and with images (I am doing a Book of Days art journal).  This intention is not just to say I did it but to enable myself to create so much this year that I finally can find my own personal artistic style and to unleash my inner artists' voice that has been lurking inside. To this end, in my Book of Days, I have written a letter to the spirit of 2011 thanking it for all I have learned last year and saying goodbye to some behaviors and beliefs that I want to release.  In addition I have written a list of qualities I want to exhibit more of this year.  So I am focused more on who I want to BE rather than only on what I want to DO, though doing is a part of being.  It's the action part, the MOVE part that is the true me.  


I took an old book from the 1940's that I had found in a thrift store to alter for this journal.  I tore out about every 3 or 4th page first of all since I know that what I will do to the pages will make them fatter and the book will expand a lot.  Then I painted over and embellished the cover.

Yes, this is an altered, collaged photo of me that I took with the webcam in my laptop, so the quality is not very good, but it seemed to need a current photo of me. When I paint and journal on the pages, I usually need to glue at least 2 pages together to strengthen them since they are very thin and in some cases somewhat crumbly.  

Here are my opening 2 pages where I am storing the letter to 2011 and my list of intentions for 2012.

Closeups of these pages:

I'll share with you some of the consequent pages as I create them.  Here are a few more to start.

This Book of Days I am doing in conjunction with a group led by a wonderful mixed media artist called Effy Wild, who is offering this work without charge via a Facebook group, emails, video tutorials, and lots and lots of encouragement!  It has been fabulous so far!  Check it out!

So, that's about all for this post. I'll share more as I create more pages.  I am also participating in a year-long art workshop called Life Book where we will be creating art as taught by 14 different well-known online mixed media artists.  It promises to be an exciting, fun, and eventful year.  I will post some of my work from this workshop next time, so stay tuned!

Yours, In Spirit -  Arlene

Finish This Book October 10 thru October 16

Welcome, and hello!  If you are playing along with me in Finish This Book, I will post each week with this Mr Linky widget here in my regular blog, rather than on the Finish This Book page I had created previously. Apparently the pages are only for static information that doesn't get changed or added to.  Not quite what I had understood originally.  I may delete that page or perhaps use it for any information on our project that might be helpful on an ongoing basis.

Right here (below) is where to link your post using the Mr. Linky widget below, and comment about your latest efforts in Finish This Book!  Hope you had fun this past week, and I'm sure we all want to hear what you did and discovered!  If you have posted to your blog, you can leave the link to the specific blog post.  If you don't have a blog but have a Flickr account and have updated pictures and text to it about Finish This Book, you can leave that link in the widget.

Feel free also to comment below, if you want to summarize or add more thoughts.  Can't wait to see what you all have been up to!

Let's Start Some Discussion!

For those people who have indicated an interest to me of wanting to work on Finish This Book together, I have created a separate page on this blog for our check-ins. You can see the tab across the top which says "Finish This Book. I have put in a link widget for you to post in, and have asked you to also comment in addition to putting your website / blog link. I know that some of you may be still waiting for your books to arrive, but for this first week, I want to just have us all sign in, and comment on your experience so far with the book, or if you are waiting for your book still, just share what you hope to experience by doing this. Since I have done the first few pages of the book, I will comment there too.

Here's my super sleuth writing assistant wanting to say hello to you all.








Here's the specific link in case you have problems seeing the tab for the page.

http://www.spiritessenceart.com/p/finish-this-book.html

See you over there!

 Arlene

I Am Writing a Book

I’ve started a new project.  I’m writing a book.  Well, I’m co-writing a book with Keri Smith of Wreck This Journal fame.  It’s a mysterious instruction manual that she found, abandoned somewhere, and it is in an unfinished state.  She has asked me to finish it, and I have accepted the challenge…  and so can you!!



Keri Smith has just released a new “adventure” book called Finish This Book , and it promises to be every bit as much fun as working along in the Wreck This Journal book that I journaled about last year.  I was fortunate enough to have received an advance copy of the book, and started in it.  I must say I was hooked right away!   I tried to talk myself out of it, as I have lots of other art projects under way or about to be started.  I just couldn’t resist!

The premise of the book is that she has found some pages of a book, uncompleted and needing an author to finish writing it.  The reader is asked to either accept the challenge and turn the page or close the book and give it to someone else!  It promises to help the new author step by step to be able to write their own book through following the projects in order in her manual.  It is fun, and I thought that if more people could do this together and share their experiences, it would be even more fun!

Here are the few pages I have done already:


We are instructed to gather together some basic tools to complete the work.  A journal, a pair of scissors, some glue, a stapler, a needle and thread, a digital camera (well, this photo was taken by my digital camera), a good eye, and a courageous spirit!  I think I do have a good eye (up for debate) and certainly a courageous spirit!








The next pages begin to tell the story of how she found the few scattered pages while walking through a park, and we were asked to draw a park bench like the ones she saw.








After that we were to look up from various sources the meaning of “sleuthing” and write it in the book.




Well, as you can see, these are simple tasks and can be done in small increments of time, and they would be quite fun to do in a group.

Who wants to join me?  We can all work at our own pace and report in once a week or every other week with a comment and a link to your blog or Flickr account.  Has anyone else ever toyed with the idea of writing a book?  I know I have but it seems such a monumental task so I just haven’t done much about it yet.  Let’s do this!!! 

If you are interested, either send me a message or post a comment to this entry.  Depending on how many others want to join me, I may set up a separate blog and link page for this or keep it simple.  Let’s have some fun together.  Tell your friends, too.  The more the merrier, I figure!

Thanks for reading – yours in Spirit

Arlene

Fun With Art Journaling

I have started on a new online workshop based on the book Raw Art Journaling  and it is a fabulous book!  I highly recommend it for people who have been art journaling for a while, for those who have never art journaled but were thinking of trying it, and for anyone else in between.  It is my good fortune to be taking this workshop free of charge (!) actually led by Quinn herself! How awesome is that?  It is being run on a Yahoo group I am in called Artists of the Round Table.

We are just completing our 3rd week and already I have learned so much!  I have dabbled in art journaling for a couple of years now, but still can’t seem to get over the hump of judging myself too harshly and avoiding the regular practice, for fear that what I create is not good enough.  Also, it seems I have difficulty doing art when I have no specific project in mind. I was hoping this class would help get me over the hump, and inspire me to move to the next level with my artwork and to be more spontaneous and communicative. 

I love that a lot of the exercises in the book require the minimum of art supplies, and that the whole idea is that whatever you put in your art journal is PERFECT.  It is helping me to lose (or confuse) that inner critic that so often stops me dead in my tracks.

The first week’s lesson actually asked us to not only outline what our ideal self would be like, but also to draw that inner critic (or Gremlin) and then find some other work for it to do to distract it!  In the photo above, you will also see my little stuffed “inner critic” with a zipper for a mouth, which I can zip shut when I want it to be quiet!  It is a much adored gift that I won from my friend Rita of Tattered Past, who created it.  Isn’t he adorable? 

The second week we started playing with words, doing an exercise called “found word poetry”, which I found to be really fun.  Now, I certainly don’t consider myself a poet, but was able to bypass that inner critic by using this technique.  Below are two examples of 2 different ways to use this technique.


For this first one, I cut out words from magazines of several types at random (I had over 50 words and phrases cut out) and then selected and arranged them to make some sort of sense. I then glued them down to some colored paper, which I then glued down to a page I had prepared with watercolor paint, over which I sprayed a watered down mixture of acrylic paint over a stencil.  If you click on the image it will enlarge, enabling you to read the words more easily, if you choose.



This next one was made from a single page of text from an old, recycled book that I got from a thrift store.  I circled some words, making new sense of the text, then painted over the remaining words with some craft acrylic paint.  Once that was dry I attached the page onto a piece of watercolor paper, used some watercolor and water soluble crayons, on top of which drew and painted the leaf and the blue mountains.  Again, click on the image to be able to read the words.

Since this post is getting long, I’ll add another post with some additional word play I did in the third week of the workshop.

One thing I am learning is that words definitely help the impact of my artwork, and using these techniques makes it much easier to be able to use the words.  If I had had to come up with the text myself, it would have been much more difficult!  Somehow “finding” the words made it a game and a fun challenge.

More next time!

Arlene