Excess & Openness.

One of the aspects I am loving about this art journal challenge is the opportunity for excess. To get carried away and go overboard and go outside the lines and just put stuff where ever seems cool at the moment.

Maybe this will be my style, or maybe eventually it will pare down on its own to reveal a more traditionally-me graphic look. Who knows? And you know what? That is totally part of the adventure and fun for me. Accepting it for what it is right now. Being open to whatever comes from within me. Creating it and then being done. Closing the book and moving on until the next inspiration hits (or the next week's challenge comes in my email box).

So often we get caught up in the "correctness" rathering than just trusting your internal voice. Trusting that it will lead you to a place of expression. A place that tells the story that needs to be told. It is finding that balance between heart and mind...and allowing it to come through to your hands as you create.

There are no wrong answers.

A bit about this art journal page: I have been wanting to work
with a cool butterfly image that is in the current issue of Real Simple
magazine. I scanned it in, removed the text, changed it to black and
white, applied the charcoal filter, upped the contrast, and then changed
it to a duotone using a dark green before printing. 

Lots of layering. Matte medium
for adhesive and over top of the images. After that was dry I stamped
and wrote around the edges. I am using a Pen-Touch white fine tip paint
pen from Sakura for my white writing. The large white writing in around
the butterfly is a font I created for Two Peas called “enjoy life”
(actually comes in the circle format with an initial in the middle).

At
first I imagined this page to be about the circle of life – using the
butterflies as representation of that theme. But as I played I kept
thinking of the saying, “what goes around comes around.” And that is
pretty much where I ended up.

And a note about contact sheets from digital photos: My pal Tracy gave me this great tip recently for creating contact sheets in Photoshop. Simply open the program, select File, Automate, Contact Sheet II and choose the file of photos from your computer you want to print. In the Contact Sheet dialog box you have the option to select how many photos you want on each page, the size, and dpi. Then hit "ok" and it will spool them for you. AWESOME.