Give Thanks

This week’s Documented Life Project prompt was to depict gratitude in a creative way.  A similar prompt had been given 25 weeks ago and I had used that opportunity to practise my typography and list all of the things I am grateful for in my life.  That had become a very busy and involved art journal page.  I decided, therefore, to make this week’s art journal page somewhat minimalist and simple.  This was also useful because life has been very busy of late and is only going to get busier as the season progresses.  Plus my house is upside down right now as two rooms are being painted.  Simple very much appealed.

Just as the previous gratitude page had afforded me the opportunity to practise an area of my art journalling that needed work, I decided to use this week’s prompt to practise creating backgrounds.  The obvious colours would have been rich and warm tones of yellows, oranges, reds and browns as befits the season and the Thanksgiving holiday.  Largely out of contrariness, therefore, I decided to do the opposite and use cold colours.  I started with a wash of watercolour in shades of blue and purple, the peacock jewel colours I am often drawn to.  I then decided to practise my stencilling again.  My skills in that regard are not good, not good at all.  This time my hand was a lot lighter and I remembered to dab off excess acrylic paint before applying it to the stencil.  Still there is a great deal of room for improvement.  I opted to use small stencils that were all circular designs so that there was some sort of harmony.  Nevertheless, the result was pretty chaotic and haphazard and messy.  Baby steps I suppose.  I then finished the page with writing the phrase “Give Thanks” in black gel pen, using just my own handwriting as the font.

There are not many weeks left now in the DLP project for 2014 but I am probably going to continue with the group’s weekly prompts into 2015.  It is useful to have that push to make time for experimentation in my art journal.  I have also been gifted the online art course, Life Book, for next year to further develop my mixed media skills and technique.  I will probably continue to blog about both of those here on Pict in PA but will be blogging about all of my other art – my non-art-journal stuff – on my other blog, Pict Ink.  I can hardly believe that 2014 is almost at an end and I am thinking about 2015 already.