COMPLICATED ...?

 

This is me trying to illustrate for myself just how complicated my life gets when I have too much on!  Now its entirely possibly that someone else might find what was going on extremely easy to deal with, but as someone with limited energy I find I get overwhelmed easily .... and then nothing AT ALL gets done!

It began, as most of my pages do, with a painted background using my Neocolour II crayons. You'll appreciate that this basic page is nothing fancy, but you see it doesn't have to be, since I will cover much of it up anyway.  Some people new to art journalling can get in a bit of a panic over producing "arty" backgrounds, but they can be very simple because they're just a jumping off point!

The next stage for me is collaging - all sorts of bits going on here, as you can see.  The figure is made up from bits cut out of colour copies of previous journal pages,plus a scrap of patterned paper.  The round element top and bottom right has been done using a stamp (with a few bits added).  The rest is just me drawing bits and bobs and decorating with dots.

The twisty wormholes on the body got me thinking about feeling overwhelmed by a complicated tangle, so I chose to extend them some more and tangle up the figure.  As you can also see I've used my Posca paint pen (black) to add spiky extensions to some of the corner elements.  I use these pens for nearly everything now, and the black is particularly good compared to most pens because its a really deep dark black, so stands out against the background brilliantly.  My only complaint is that they don't make them fine enough, but I manage.  Also the full range of colours isn't available in the finest point, which is disappointing.  If ever I find the energy to do so I might write and tell them that.

And then I just fiddled around and doodled some more in the spaces, which for me is my favourite meditative stage of building a page.  You can also see on the lower right that I totally changed the element there - I just wasn't happy with it so used a paint pen to go over it and give me a plain background to work on instead.

Fortunately, in the 10 days or so since I made this page, a few things have been resolved and life became very much less frantic.  Except that now I have to get ready to shoot off south directly after church tomorrow to drive to the other end of the country to attend no.2 daughter's MA graduation, not to mention taking a car full of the baby stuff I've made/collected for the baby she's expecting in 4 weeks time.  Ooops, I think life just got a bit busy again, but at least I can snooze in the car while himself drives .... or then again maybe I'll knit and see if I can use the journey time to finish the baby cardigan I'm working on?

I do LIKE to keep reasonably active and occupied, just not quite THIS busy .......!!  Anyway, here's a challenge for you - make and share your pages on the complications of life and I'll put them up here.

YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND .....

I keep coming back to this colour combination of blue and lime green - just love it, maybe almost as much as orange and pink?  These are just happy colours for me.

And you can see below how it started out - I am trying to make backgrounds of more than one colour, but I have this besetting sin of always working in tones of the same colour, and its something I must fight against!  This page must be a success on that front because I've actually used 3 different paint colours on it - just absolutely bog standard acrylic paint, nothing fancy.

Most of my pages begin with a painted background like this, and then I add collage as the fancy takes me.  The bits of black text you can see below are actually tissue paper - I love searching out printed tissue, and when you tear pieces off and put them on with matte medium they dry transparent.  I just LOVE the effect it gives.

So then I added some paint pen doodles - which have such great opacity you can even put yellow over blue - and used my circle punches to cut out shapes from colour copies of old journal pages, adding other page scraps as well.  Why pay for collage sheets when you can make your own, right? This was a tip from from Teesha Moore and its really brilliant - I use it all the time now.

The page stayed like this for a few days, before I came in again, sat down and got some stuff off my chest. Journalling is such a great stress buster, and even though nobody but me knows what this page is about that doesn't really matter.  Revisiting my journals in the future, perhaps I will remember what was happening, but then again I guess its not important if I don't?  The point is to get it down on paper at the time, and rob it of its negative power.  It works for me, which is mainly why I do it.  I don't just journal the negative emotions in my life though, the beauty of keeping a journal is that you can celebrate EVERYTHING, good, bad, average, whatever.

And that left just the final doodly details, which as you know I absolutely adore doing - there's something so restful about it as you drift off into the doodle zone ....  I actually listen to talk radio a lot of the time while I'm working, but that's just me, and I can stand a lot of silence and my own company.

Sorry these pictures are a little bit dark - I wish now I'd photoshopped them to lighten them up a touch, but I'm sure you get the idea ...

Thanks for stopping by!

Rosie X

BLUE DAYS .....

 

Yes I admit it, I made this at a time when I wasn't having one of my better days!  What the heck, for me journalling is about recording the highs and the lows, the positives and the negatives.  I'm sure you've been there - those times when you wonder why you even bother trying because you're never going to get anywhere?  Ah, I knew you'd understand ....

So anyway, I'd started off with a light blue painted page, with the colour at the edges deepened with some Neocolour II crayon.  Just collaged a few bits from magazines, a blue star from a sheet of wrapping paper, and a bit of washi tape.  I honestly didn't know where it was going at this point and part of me wasn't sure I cared.

So then I got some stuff off my chest by writing it down, before painting over it.  I know its there but nobody else needs to read my darker musings, right?  So when I found the word blue in my collage box that pretty much led to the whole theme, and I added a bit more stuff.

And this is what it led to in the end - and actually I journalled myself out of the worst of my mood, just by admitting that I felt bad and there wasn't much I could do about it!  All the dotty doodling and drawing seemed to have cheered me up.

Anyway, hope I haven't made you feel all blue and gloomy, and by way of contrast I thought you might like to see my (messy) desk in the lovely cheerful room I work in?  On my table is the junk journal I've just finished making (my first ever, but not my last!) and that I'm now working in on and off.  The room is basically white with rather a lot of pink - its my cheerful, happy colour for blue days like the above!

At the back of the desk is where I keep all my pens and markers, and you can just see the nice view of our garage.  Fortunately that doesn't bother me because my head is usually bent over whatever I'm doing.  The "create wonder, share joy" sign was begged from our local Starbucks, where I spend way too much time catching up with friends and putting the world to rights.  That's when I'm not nagging that the company pays its taxes!!