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Thursday 4 August 2011

Elements of Art Journaling continued

Well I've done another 2 pages in the Elements of Art Journaling e-course I'm taking with Effy from Wild Precious Studios.  I am absolutely loving the course and I'm learning so much too!

The first page is for Air Week.  This week we had to practice free-writing around the idea of 'what I know for sure...'.  Free-writing is where you just sit for a certain lenth of time, in this case 15 minutes, and write whatever comes into your head.  Its a great technique if you're wrestling with solution to a problem as it can fall out of the free-writing.  The element of air is all about communication and words.  So of course me being me, I went down a different path from everyone else.  I looked at the other associations with air and discovered that smell and the colour yellow are associated.  As soon as I saw that the page came together easily.

Being a qualified aromatherapist, smell is very important to me and the first thing I thought of was lavender.  I used the free-writing as the background for the page, painted gesso over it and Claudine Hellmuth Yellow Pastel paint over that.  Once it was dry I rubbed Vaseline in parts over the page and painted Titan Buff over that.  Unfortunately I left it too long to rub the paint off the Vaseline and had to scratch some of it off ;)

I painted the lavender using Sheena Douglass' Paint Fusion technique.  For the other side of the page I left a portion in the middle unpainted and coloured it with a yellow Inktense Pencil and activated it with gesso to get a lovely pastel colour that I could write over.  The writing is my attempt at a poem-ish!!

The next week was Water Week which Effy gave us 2 weeks to complete as it is about our emotions and 'sitting with' the way we feel.  She suggested doing some writing about how we feel using water soluble pencils / crayons then painting a compassionate face over it and putting a loving sentiment on the page.  As I am suffering from depression this was going to be a step too far for me as I felt that it may drag me into the abyss I have been trying to get out of.

So I did an alternative page.  I did some 'sitting with it', but just to type out my problems.  Water is about 'daring' and 'dreaming', so this is what I did on my page.  I used lots of blue and green Inktense Pencils and activated them with gesso again to make the background.  I used the same pencils over the words and used water this time to activate them, then put twinkling H2O's over them.  I wanted the whole page to be irridescent. The bubbles are a tiny letter 'o' stamped in Golden Iridescent Gold paint. 

The Sea Horse is from Chocolate Baroque (previously Elusive Images) and I used it because they are very elegant, move so freely and ride the waves when they hit underwater. These are all things I struggle with. If a 'wave' hits me it'll knock me for six and moving freely is completely out of the question!

I am really happy with my page.  At some point I'll do the 'sitting with it' exercise, but not now.

4 comments:

Janet said...

Your pages are lovely and colourful and your honest explanations as to the motivation behind them are quite humbling. I think you are a very brave person who works hard to put a handle on things that get you down. An inspiration to many - SO THERE!
love
Janet xx (a very unreliable correspondent who could do better)

Unknown said...

Hi Hun nice to see you at my blog. I love your journal pages as you know from Wild Precious ;0) However, you have entered your work in my monthly challenge and it'a all about fairies in the month of Aug, I didn't see any in these pages or a link back to the blog Journal Journey's.

However, There is lots of time to enter yet, ;0) I do hope you will come back with another one of your stunning pages soon.

Love Dawn xx

erasercarver said...

You can really tell that you are getting so much from this course, your artwork is fantastic and it is good to read all your motivation behind the pages.

judith@poppy cottage said...

Fab page Jill, love some of the techniques, must try activating Inktense with gesso. I haven't tried that before. Love the iridescent bubbles. I can quite undestand your reluctance to sit with the page under the circumstances. There are folks in our house who couldn't do that that either. Big hugs, Judith xx