A Jar of Eyes

The Art Journal Adventure prompt for last week was “Eyes”.  I knew instantly what I wanted to do – it just took me almost an entire week to find the time to do it.  When I was a wee girl, I became fascinated with glass eyes.  I saw some in a junk shop I was in with my Gran and thought they looked amazing.  I was a massive fan of marbles so to me they were like really cool marbles.  I wanted them but my request was denied, whether for price or for taste reasons I do not know.  I would repeatedly tell my parents that I wanted to start collecting glass eyes.  It never happened.  This journal page, however, is inspired by that lifelong fascination with glass eyes and depicts an imagined collection of them.

44 - Jar of Eyeballs - Art Journal Page

A Jar of Favourites

This week’s lesson on Life Book was taken by Lynn Whipple and was entitled “Favourite Favourites”.  The idea was to reflect on all of the favourite things in our lives and to create a painting of a jar to contain all of those favourite things.  Cue lots of Julie Andrews singing in my head.  The lesson seemed to perfectly complement the Jar of Awesome lesson.

The techniques deployed were really fun.  Painting somewhat sloppily with very liquid watercolour, finger painting and splattering with watercolour.  Although I work with watercolour frequently and I enjoy splattering ink and paint, this was actually the first time I had ever splattered with watercolour.  Definitely something to do again as I loved the way the splattered pigment began to bleed into the wet paint on the paper.  Remarkably, while I draw with an ink dip pen all the time, I never use it to write with.  I think that lack of practice is probably evident from the finished piece with its scratchiness, inconsistent line weight and the bleeding of the ink in some areas of the paper.  I also enjoyed creating the positive shape by painting the negative space.  That is an approach I will use again.

I generated my list of favourite things by just plucking them from the top of my head.  My hobbies are in there and so is rather a lot of food.  It seems like eating might be my favourite hobby of all.  I even asked myself what my favourite herb was.  Food Glorious Food.  A brainworm to replace Julie Andrews.  It’s a very eclectic list that includes items running from Art to Zombies.  Raspberries, Rome and rust.  It is certainly a diverse range of things that make me happy.

Week 9 - Favourites

What would top your list of favourite things?

My Jar of Awesome

One of the bonus lessons on the Life Book course was to create a decorative jar.  The idea is that the jar will fill up, over the course of the year, with little notes of achievement, celebration, happy moments, things to be grateful for so that at the conclusion of the year it becomes a celebratory record of all the positives from the year, however small each little recorded moment might be.  The lesson was actually weeks ago but I only found time this weekend to finally embark on the project, having taken a while to even find a decent sized jar.

I collaged the jar with a book page, a paper bag and magazine clippings and finished it off with washi tape, glitter tape and a tag attached with gold elastic.  My two younger sons also made jars of their own but didn’t want a photo of them shared.  Now we just need to start filling our jars with notes of our awesomeness.

Jar of Awesome 2

Jar of Awesome 1