It has been a few weeks since I did anything in my art journal. Life just got crazy busy and my free time has all but vanished – more of which at a later date – and what time I have had has been used to try and keep on top of my art courses. My poor art journal has been neglected. When this week’s Colour Me Positive prompt appeared, however, it was the shove I needed to actually open the journal and do something. The result was my quickest journal page ever. This took me five minutes. That’s it. Five small minutes. And the page shows the total lack of investment and effort. Ha! But that is OK because at least I opened the art journal and did something.
The theme was Change and the quotation was “Life does not get better by chance; it gets better by change”. I googled and it turns out it is from some motivational speaker named Jim Rohn. It is a little bit trite for my taste, the phrasing at least, but I a) agree with the concept and b) did not have time to contemplate an alternative so I decided to use the quotation. I had a page in my art journal where I had been experimenting with watercolour, testing out how the pigments would mix, run together, and what the resulting puddles would look like once dried. Just random shapes and marks all over the page. I thought I might repurpose it eventually but with no idea when, how or why. So why not just write the quotation over the top of the watercolour blobs? After all, transforming the purposeless page would chime with the theme of Change. So I shoved a paint brush into a bottle of India ink, scrawled the quotation across the page, roughly encircled it with a thinner brush in the same ink. Five minutes maximum. Done. Not very arty or creative but job done. And maybe now I can get back in the habit of cracking open the art journal at least once a week again.