Art journaling

I learned a bit about art journaling last year from a library book, and did a one-month daily art journaling challenge. This year, I read another book about art journaling, and started doing it more regularly.

The technique takes a bit of time, a bit at a time, with periods of paint drying and glue drying in between. So I have been intentionally doing only one page per week, and making it part of my Sabbath rest.

Generally speaking, the procedure is to start with a page--not necessarily a blank page--and do some arty stuff to it, then some more arty stuff, and then some more and some more, until it all hangs together (more or less). Mistakes can be torn out or painted over, or papered over. Unconnected bits can be overlapped by another layer, to visually relate them to each other.

For materials I mostly use pens, pencils, acrylic paints, the children's markers and crayons, old magazines, and decoupage medium.

As I said in the previous post, after a bit of playing around, often a theme starts to emerge, and can be reinforced, to build a meaningful artwork. Or, the theme can be chosen beforehand.

I have been incorporating some visual images from my life into my pages, like how the neighbor's lighted window shines out into the darkness after dusk.

Last minute gift crafting: decoupaged pens

A family member had writing utensils on their Christmas list. My Christmas shopping is finished, and all we have in stock at home are promotional giveaway pens and beat-up pencils.

But I had an idea:  take some pretty paper, and cover some not-pretty pens with it. I had some green marbled paper from my first try at shaving cream marbling. I also had decoupage medium on hand (although clear acrylic varnish or even white glue would work).

So I cut strips of the paper, painted the back sides of them with the glue, wrapped them around the pens like cylindrical wallpaper, smoothed them out, and then painted the outside surface of the paper, as a sealer.

After doing a few pens, I also grabbed an old pencil, sawed off the used-up eraser, and covered it in the same paper.

They came out well, although not perfect, as I was in a hurry, and damp paper tends to wrinkle.

I used to do this with pens and pencils for my own home, but at some point I got busy and forgot about it. I'm going to start it up again, though, instead of just living with ugly pens.

About the bedroom curtains

Why I made a mad splurge of $12 on second-hand curtains:

First of all, you have to understand that I loathe the color beige, which I strongly associate with dentists' offices and other unpleasantly grown-up spaces. And that the interior of this house is mostly beige.

Once upon a time, someone at a household textiles company told their designer, "Design a fabric for a woman living in a Fifties rambler that has been updated in neutral colors, who wants a more organic feel to the home."  The designer came back with a pattern that had goofy modernistic rectangles in beige, off-white, and white in the background, and greenery with purple flowers in the foreground.  The curtains fit very well into the bedroom, and really help to tie it together, even though the pattern seems cynically over-deliberate.

There is a principle here that I am trying to work out, which I call "Accept and Transcend". The curtains accept the basic beige room color, but transcend it by going beyond it into floral colors. I've been experimenting with this in several other rooms with the artwork that we have, two paintings and a photograph of natural subjects. Each picture has a little beige in it somewhere, so it accepts the wall color, but then each picture goes off into a different and much richer palette of colors from nature. I hung up a piece of birch bark in the bathroom that accomplishes the same thing.

I've since added a couple of pieces of wood furniture to the bedroom that seem to really glow against the beige carpet and walls and the very pale bleached woodwork.  I salvaged an IKEA floor lamp that my husband was going to scrap and made a quick shade for it with thin sheet copper.  The rest of the lamp is gray, and I am thinking of decoupaging over it with jungle green paper from magazine pages, since I am low on paint at the moment, and deep emerald green is a color that I would like more of in my home.