Keith left early Friday morning to work Mid-Ohio races. He worked the entire weekend, not returning home until late Sunday evening. That left me home alone for three whole days to indulge in Art-O-Rama! It was all art, all weekend and the creative juices were flowing.
As is typical with my journaling, I have no idea what any new spread will be. I open my journal to the first empty pages and let "spirit" take control. On this spread, I was humming Bob Marley's "War - No More Trouble", so I took a Sharpie and began the repetitive writing, "We don't need no more trouble" - a lyric from Marley's song". By the time I finished that page, I had moved on to another song - "The Windows of the World", Hal David & Burt Bacharach's song made famous by Dionne Warwick. I wrote the lyric, "what is this whole world coming to?" in the same manner that I wrote the previous lyric.
After I finished writing, I looked through my folder of items previously torn from magazines to see if anything "spoke" to me to go onto the page. I found a beautiful, exotic, dark haired woman who begged to be part of this spread. I was drawn to her beauty and the way she was sitting. It just seemed to fit. The word "future" was also on the same page and when I turned the page over, the phrases "it's a mind game" and "restorative powers", also jumped out at me. I attached the image of the female and the word "future" to the spread using Mod Podge, and then I applied drops of white, gold and black craft acrylic and spread it over the pages with an old credit card. I removed excess paint with a paper towel.
After the background dried, I applied white craft acrylic over the image of the woman and sketched in wings using my fingers. Using a brush handle like a pencil, I began adding golden highlights to the wings in a scribbling motion to add texture. I used a black water soluble pastel to scribble in some hair, wing and arm details.
I also added in "Where Do We Go From Here?" (Lyrics from my friend, TRS), and added a few small details to her eyes and lips. Lastly, I applied the phrases with Mod Podge.
It's a pretty bleak spread but I was contemplating bleak subjects as I worked with my materials. And that's what journaling is about. I think the more you abandon yourself to the process, the more your true feelings manifest on the page. That's where real contemplation and realization occur. We are multi faceted creatures and I think it's important to recognize the things that we consider to be "dark" or "negative". In the end, it's all about the "Happy Creating!"
