ENOUGH ... AND MORE THAN ENOUGH

 

Here's a journal page done in landscape format - for some reason (just habit probably) I almost always do vertical pages.  However, every now and then I go mad and turn the book sideways - just to prove to myself that I'm really a free-spirit maverick rule-breaker .....

What I did here was make a page - a background of neocolour crayons and some bits of collage - just for the FUN of it.  Easy to forget that's supposed to be what journalling is for, the fun and pleasure of it.  Sometimes I know I'm trying too hard to make pages which contain deep wisdom and extraordinary art .... who am I trying to kid?  Its just me reflecting, playing, drawing, getting insights down on paper that I either need to work through or keep for future reference.  That's it.  I don't have to make heirlooms for my children to inherit, and nobody has to see it except me unless I choose to share it.  Working this way you can just relax and enjoy the process ....

I liked those legs from a collage sheet (Cemerony I think) and they went with the pinky background too.  I seem to be psychologically incapable of not using colours that "go".  It took me years to discover that pink and orange together don't clash, they're absolutely gorgeous!

So anyway, I returned to this background at a time when I was thinking about the concept of "enough" which is a bit of an obsession of mine, and I might have mentioned it before (sorry if I have).  In a society obsessed with over-consumption how often do you hear somebody say "actually I've got enough stuff and don't need any more".  Revolutionary concept isn't it, and one I've been exploring for some time, particularly in these recessionary times.

Sometimes my arms hurt a lot so on this occasion I didn't want to get involved in lots of careful lettering, which can make my hand cramp.  Anyway for some reason I can't actually explain, even to myself, I just love old typewriter fonts, and like to use them often.  Try a free site like my favourite Dafont, you'll find loads, and I guarantee you can waste hours on there poring over all manner of delicious fonts.

Obviously it doesn't take long to type your thoughts and print them out, and I often use this technique of cutting the result into strips - I do it a lot in my scrapbooks, or on the Brave Girls truth cards I make sometimes.  It works really well, particularly if you outline the strips a bit to make them stand out - you might notice I've inked the edges of these, but you can equally just draw round them, or highlight one particular word for emphasis.

And then I just doodled around until the page looked finished!  That's one of the parts I like best.  It began with the wobbly white lines - wobbly because its SO much easier to make them deliberately wobbly rather than attempt to get them perfect.  So I drew wobbly lines and then decorated around them with dots.  Easy peasy.

And I do think that the idea of enough is an important one - particularly if you believe as I do that all you have is God's gift.  We spend/waste such a lot of our lives protecting and preserving our "stuff", when half the time we don't actually even need that much of it!  Daft isn't it?