Word Painting

14 Sunday Feb 2010

Tags

art, gothic, journaling, medieval, process

This is my favorite page from my gothic arch journal (titled “Word Painting” after the cover page now). I don’t know why it’s my favorite, except perhaps that I like peacocks, and I like the color combination.

My favorite image is actually the bird-headed woman here:

Besides being the most daring I’ve gotten with collage, it is also resonates very strongly with the story I’ve been working on, which is something I’d like to see happen more and more in my journals.

However, the page as a whole leaves me cold. I had set it up to use as a demo for a shading technique at last week’s art journal workshop, but it was kind of a disaster. The first mistake was putting the tree in the forefront of the page, when the woman should have been the main focus. I also had a strong border around the edges, further distracting from the image. My efforts to fix the composition flaw with shading, stamped texture, and text just made the whole thing a mess. You couldn’t focus on the woman at all. So I colored over nearly everything with a watercolor crayon, added a unobtrusive dot border and a narrow band of text. I wouldn’t say it “saved” the page, but it did allow the woman to show up more prominently, and that is the thing I want to remember when I look back at this page!

The lesson in this is two-fold. One: if you don’t like what happens on a page, don’t give up. Keep working at it, adding layers, covering parts up. I know the temptation to rip pages out of your journal is strong but resist it. You can always salvage something!

Two: You’re not going to love every page of your journal, and that’s okay. Creative journaling is about the process, not the product. Sometimes the process is frustrating, but it is still teaching you something. Each time you look back at the page you don’t like, you’ll remember what it was you learned when you made it. Keep those unlikeable pages in your journal, so you remember your whole journey.

You can view the rest of the pages of the journal in my flickr stream, if you so desire. And here’s hoping you are having a great Sunday/Valentine’s Day/Chinese New Year!

Last and First

01 Monday Feb 2010

Posted by Stace in Creative Journaling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, gothic, journaling, medieval, process, workshops

Monday, February 8th, is the next free creative journaling workshop at It’s A Grind in Laguna Hills. Most supplies are provided by the coffeeshop, and I will have a small number of 16-page journals available for sale for $5 (like the one I used for my Create Your Own Reality journal). Feel free to bring your own journal and supplies, as well. Did I mention it’s free?

This is the last page of my “Create Your Own Reality” journal. The butterflies, which became an unanticipated motif in this book, forced themselves onto the page here. For example, the image of the woman was something I pulled out of a magazine a month ago, and I didn’t realize until I went to glue her onto the page that she was holding a butterfly in her hand. (It was a very tiny, hard to distinguish butterfly, though, so I replaced it with a larger one.) The rest of the butterflies were from a sheet that I was given at a recent craft show, synchronicity at work to be sure!

I tried to do a gel medium transfer, but as you can see it worked very poorly. I don’t know if it was that I didn’t wait long enough, or something with the paper, or what. I only know that I ended up with a mess on a page. But, as I like to say, mistakes (mess-takes, in Anna’s vernacular) are only an opportunity to try something you didn’t expect. In this instance, the fragments of butterflies led me to express a thought about my writing that has vexed me for a while now.

This is the cover of my new gothic arch journal, which I first posted pictures of last week. Atypically for me, the title of the page came first — Word Painting is the title of a book we’ve been reading in my writers group, about descriptive writing. At some point in our last discussion it occurred to me that it applies to creative journaling, if in a slightly different way. And then I found the quill image in my clippings box (you DO have a clippings box for your creative journaling, don’t you?) and knew it was a fit. The red also looks very striking against the brown background (I do like red and brown, as you might guess from this site’s layout). In another move of synchronicity, Melodye posted a page today that used the exact same quill and ink image.

The text was a little problematic. I knew I wanted to do found poetry—words clipped from a page and arranged in unexpected combinations—but all the magazines I had available have text so tiny that it would have been a chore worthy of Psyche to carry out. I ended up going to MagneticPoetry.com and playing with the online version. When I came up with something suitable, I did a screen grab, printed the result, and cut out the words for re-assembly on the page. I particularly like the phrase “deep ink” … I think that’s what I’m going to strive for in my work this month, to dive deep into the words to discover what truth and story lies underneath.

Which reminds me that it’s time to get back to that short story once again. My writers group has tried to shame me for being so long without presenting anything for critique. Now I’m at the top of the list, and If I don’t have something ready to go by Thursday, I will face their condemnation. Okay, maybe not that, but I can expect a little indulgent condescension, all of which will be deserved if I don’t deliver!