Each Day is a New Beginning

After five weeks, I finally managed to open my art journal and create a page.  This was thanks to me actually being able to go along to my art journal meet up group for the first time in months.  I decided to use the most recent Colour Me Positive art journal prompt as my jumping off point.  The prompt was the theme of “new beginnings”.  There are a lot of ways I could have chosen to interpret that prompt, from the personal to the more expansive and profound.  I chose, however, to think about the regular beats of life, its cycles and rhythms, and the idea of each passing day being a new beginning came to mind.  I decided to illustrate a winter sunrise.  I was actually going to keep the page monochromatic, just shades of black and grey, but one of the other ladies at the meet up suggested I add just a splash of colour to the sun so I added some yellow and orange.  I cannot decide if that was a positive step to take or not.  I think maybe yellow would have looked nice against the greys but not so much the orange.  But such experiments are precisely what an art journal is handy for.

 

Dream, Laugh, Joy

I have not opened my art journal in over a month.  Any free time I have had to spend on art has been rationed for tackling some Life Book or Let’s Face It lessons, my 100 Faces project, or Inktober drawings.  There has been no time going spare for just playing with materials and ideas in my art journal.  After a couple of intense weeks of being over-scheduled and no real end in sight before Thanksgiving break, I decided I needed some creative play in my art journal just to decompress and recalibrate  bit.

I looked at the two most recent Colour Me Positive art journal prompts for inspiration.  One of them was about Dreaming and Dreams and one was about Laughter and Joy.  Those seemed like the right sort of positive qualities to focus on.  I decided to just start drawing and splashing ink and watercolour around and see what emerged on the pages.  Perhaps because I have been working on my series of faces, in both instances it was a face that emerged first and then the pages evolved from that starting point.  While visually it does not relate much to the theme, I quite like the way the Dream page turned out.  The page with the smiling figure, however, went pear-shaped early on with the placement of the hands.  I thought I could maybe fudge those and still pull the page together but then another “cat collaboration” happened.  Peanut the cat decided to stroll across my page, right through some yellow paint, smearing it right across the face.  A jaundiced face was not part of my plan.  I kept adding to the rainbow around the edge of the figure, pulling the shape out as a negative space, while trying to decide what to do about the smudgy yellow face.  The face, quite frankly, was a little creepy even before the cat’s contribution.  Then I remembered the Roald Dahl quotation about good thoughts shining out of a face like sunbeams and thought maybe I could use that as an excuse for the yellow cast to the face.  That quotation got stamped on and the page was complete.  Not a success in any aesthetic or artistic sense but I played in my journal for long enough to complete two pages so that was a score for creativity.