Sorry I have been AWOL for a couple of weeks - just overtaken by the usual Christmas busyness of course, as I expect most of you are.  Am pleased to report that all is now organised, and if it isn't that's just too bad, because I'm not losing sight of the real reason for our celebrations ... a great mystery of love unfolding before us if we can tear ourselves away from excessive consumerism, snowmen and robins for a minute.  Sermon over.

Anyway, this started in the simplest possible way when I just painted the page red using standard acrylics.  Sometimes it doesn't have to be more complicated that this, and I chose the colour because it was a dark wet day .... adding an eye from my collection of collage images, a new honeycomb stamp (which I'm not altogether thrilled with) , a section of black and white border from my own home made collage sheet, and a scrap of tissue paper laid down with matte medium.

The circle pattern is another new stamp, part of a set I really like.  I've been so into black and white line drawings lately, its obviously my latest "phase" but its such a simple concept that you can do so much with!  The words just came ... so presumably were the ones I most needed to get off my chest at the time.

The pointy finger is another stamp, an old favourite, and then I just started doodling with my white paint pen, because I knew that what I'd written was enough, and there was no more to say.

So you know how it goes, I doodled away to my heart's content - its almost meditative doing this and possibly the part I love the best, or maybe second-best anyway!

There's no answer to give to this because it isn't a question, just the statement of how things ARE, but at least admitting it here is the first step to making the changes that will bring those Better Times to fruition?  With the coming of a New Year shortly its probably a good time to do this kind of thinking ...?

I hope your Christmas is Holy and Blessed, and I look forward to your company as the journey continues into 2015 ...

THE MIND OF GOD .....

   

I don't always blog my spiritual pages - some of them are simply too personal - but this one isn't in

that category!  It came out of a line in one of our Sunday hymns where the phrase "the mind of God" was used, and I remember thinking that I wouldn't dare to presume to know what God was thinking!

So anyway, that was what was rolling around my brain when I was working on this page.  I just made a painted background as usual, and as usual I stuck to one colour.  I keep telling myself to use two or three but I'm not very good at it.

So then when I put some collage on I made myself use a good strong contrast colour - very often I'll end up choosing pieces which are from the same palette, I get sort of stuck in the tone on tone way of working, and lots of shades of blue looks GOOD doesn't it.  Anyway, I climbed out of my rut on this occasion.  Not quite sure what I was thinking when I made the figure - she reminds me of an African woman with big necklaces, can't remember the name of the tribe who dress that way.  Reflecting on the fact that she looks a bit "other" and "different" connected back to my thoughts about the mind of God, and that it doesn't work in the same ways as ours.

So then of course I had my page subject, although I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to say yet, so focused on doing a bit of doodling, and you know how much I enjoy that!

On this occasion I didn't even feel the need to cover every single inch of the page with doodling, although most of it got treated to some dots - I do like adding them, they seem to work like shading.

And of course I was able to work through my ideas about the mind of God, and to conclude that the problem in thinking was mine and not Hers!  When you try to see the world from God's point of view a lot of things change ....

This is one of my favourites among my recent pages - its partly the colours, but somehow it seems quite "free", something I work towards in my art but don't often achieve!!

FIFTH DECADE ....

 

By golly its all excitement around here!  I have a new journal and I'm LOVING working it in - its another spiral bound book and approx 10 x 10" square.  I've filled 8 A5 ones so far, and it was a big step to branch out from those, so forgive me if this seems like a small thing to get excited about, but I am!  The extra space of the square format allows so much more possibility.

For those who like to know such things its a Pink Pig journal and the paper is a really nice quality - although I am still sticking two pages together as I like them to be nice and strong for anything I may throw at them, and don't want any bleed through.

You can see below what nice effects I got on this new paper (gessoed first) with my Neocolour II crayons - I never got subtle watercolour type results like this before.

I was so delighted that it took me a while to decide I could bear to do any work on top, but eventually I went for outlining some of the "layers" and doodling in the spaces.  This was done using Pitt Artist pens which write pretty well over the crayon - except if its laid on too thick when it gets a bit waxy.  However I now have a secret weapon to combat this problem in the form of a black Posca paint pen, which writes superbly over absolutely anything!  Its not as fine a nib as some others you can get, but its great for doodling and drawing.  The white and greeny blue are also Posca colours - I have a selection of these in medium and in the finer 0.7.  The colour range is sadly much better in the bigger chunky nibs (why?) but I have fun even with the limited choice of 10-12 colours, and particularly like their opacity.  If I want see through colours I go with my Promarkers.

The page was then left like this for over a week because I was so delighted with it that I didn't want to ruin it, but in the end a journal page isn't one (for me anyway) unless it has words on it, and these are what popped out of the far recesses of my brain.

So as you can see, I'm not at all troubled by the fact that I shall be 60 next week - my fifties have been absolutely fabulous (painful illness notwithstanding) and I hope my next decade will see me grow as an artist as much or more than I have in this one.  We shall see!!

PINK AND STRIPY ....

I made this stripy page some time ago using my water-soluble crayons but then didn't do anything with it for a while, until I encountered this quote in a newspaper and just had to journal about it.
I find that extra-fine Sharpie pens (among others) write really well over the crayon layers, and the bits at the top were just crying out for a bit of doodling, while I thought about what else I wanted to say. I love doing pages like this with the layers of colour - it practically invites you write on them and to build up layers of meaning as you do so.
The stripes and colours here really feel like me, and so does the doodling. I always wish I could do pages which are loose and free, all spattered with paint and layers of paper etc., but that doesn't seem to come naturally to me at all. You might guess that I'm kind of tidy and organised, a bit of a neat freak if I'm honest. Sorry. However, since it's my journal and I get to pick what goes in it (and what I show of it) I shall carry on regardless in unrepentant fashion!
By the way .... Happy Palm Sunday. We had a donkey at church, but it firmly declined to come in even though we wanted it to. Hey ho, the kids all had rides afterwards, which was FUN.

I LIKE DRAWING

I've been threatening to clear out cupboards in the studio for ages, so today I'm pleased to report that one of them is done and the charity shop has benefited from the process. Still found time to journal of course, and this was one of the backgrounds made from scrapbook paper - where I needed to strengthen a page. I just added a bit of brown around the edges, and then started doodling (can you tell I LOVE doing that) ....?
The clock just seemed to belong and the stripes sort of grew. I didn't actually know what the page was going to be about until I wrote the word sanctuary, and then all the ideas and feelings exploded! Such an emotive word, with layers of meaning connected to safety, needing to retreat, having a space which is just mine etc.
Until quite recently I'd forgotten I could draw, and now it's a joy to be doing more of it. I suppose you can figure out that this little house in a tree is all about a safe sanctuary? Not sure why its in a tree but have to trust my own instinct, and at least I could draw up the rope ladder if I needed to be alone? The way it looks is a bit Hobbit-ish isn't it, but I think if I could design a house of my own that's the sort of thing I would build, with round doorways and windows, and lots of curves instead of straight lines. Did you ever see Ben Law's house on Grand Designs - I really really wanted to live there ...
And this is the finished page - another one I'm really pleased with (I still dislike some that I make). The satisfaction has to do with feeling that I've put down something I really wanted to communicate, and I like the way it looks too. It makes me happy. Like I said, I think I've found my "one thing".