Maya's Visual Journal

Oh my! I've been surfing around trying to find some inspiration and did I hit the mother load! Maya of Rituales..."Listening to the wisdom of ancient ancestors..." finished a visual journal and posted the whole thing in a separate blog: Maya's Visual Journal I will be going back over these pages for days. I can see that I've been trying to hard to fit too many things in. I can't wait to get home and break out the materials.

Not journaling

I can't believe it's been nearly two weeks since I've posted. That's because I haven't been journaling either. I guess I have end of the summer doldrums. I just spent some time catching up on Julie's" Journal. Now she has been busy. Hopefully this will inspire me to get busy with my own journal. I hate it when I lapse like this. I haven't even been filling in the tiny block in my calendar. It's like the thing has a lock on it.

I finished up my RawArt Yahoo group everyday project today and sent it out. I wound up making 33 of these 5" x 5" interpretations of the crazy quilt heart that I made years ago. I decided to put them up in a separate blog, which is just too easy to do to avoid. I thought it would be better to have them all together. 

I've been having a bit of a block journaling lately. Yesterday someone on one of my Yahoo groups sent a link to the 2005 Graceful Envelope Contest. There is lots of great art there and this one in particular really appealed to me. I went up to my worktable and came up with this journal spread. It's obviously not an exact replica of the style because I had only looked at the envelope for a couple of minutes, but it was fun to do. The weird-looking drawings are from the other evening when I tried to do some contour sketches of my dolls. I wasn't happy with the way they turned out, but I like to keep all my sketches so I can look back and see if I've improved. Faces for some reason are so hard for me. 

The journaling on this spread is all about how sometimes the pages don't flow. When I finished it, I wound up actually liking it. Go figure. 

Another older layout that follows the first page recipe. I started this in Sept 2004 and just finished the last box today. 

I finally got around to writing up one of the page recipes I talked about earlier. This spread, an older one from Aug 29, 2004, is an example so I thought I would post it here. This was the 11th spread I did after learning from Laurie Gatlin how to paint the pages of my compo books. I hate to admit it, but there are still no finished photos to go in the boxes labeled "finished photo here" because I still haven't tackled the project. 

I'm not sure if this page is done or not, but I wanted to share another version of lettering done with my new Ellison die-cut stencils. I drew around the stencil with silver pen and then squiggled with a different silver pen. That still didn't stand out enough to suit me, so I put the punched out part of the letter over it as a mask and sponged on some acrylic paint. I like the way it turned out. I also like the lighter paints over the navy background. I probably wouldn't have tried that if I weren't trying to fix the lettering. Whew! I think I'm through posting for a while. 

We were talking just the other day about how to prevent the paint from slopping from one page to another. Sometimes it happens regardless of what I do to prevent it. Usually it's black or another dark color. The stamps were all carved by me from erasers. 

I love these stencils I made using the Ellison die cut system at our educational coop. I wasn't sure what to do about the letters like "O" and "B" until I picked up my new books and the title of Drawing from Life has similar letters which are just solid black. I think I like the look of the "O"s on books the way I did it here. I am loving both books by the way. The Decorated Journal by Gwen Diehn is the other one I got. 

The finished version of my June calendar. I need to get the July one made. 

We got back from our trip on Friday evening last week and headed out of town again at 6:00 AM the next morning for a district convocation of our church. We enjoyed it, but we were sure tired. 

One final view. I saved the menu from a stop we made and added it at home. The paper was yellow, so I used some water color on it. The stamp store business card had printing on the back, so I hinged it with the clear packing tape. I can see all kinds of possible uses for this stuff. I hope it doesn't yellow like scotch tape. I bought a brown ink pad at the stamp store, so I used it to tone down the card a bit. 

A different view of the Smokie Mtn pages.The photo was from a tourist guide. The drawing is the Mountain Farm Museum which we happened upon. Actually we stopped to use the rest room and there it was. They moved several old buildings to make a re-constructed circa 1900 farm complete with tools, animals and a garden. We really enjoyed it. Johnny was surprised at how many of the farm implements he grew up with were represented here. The family ahead of us was a multi-generational Menonite family in traditional garments. It was interesting watching the father tell his sons about the different tools. 

This is one of those spreads that opens several ways which makes it hard to photograph. I painted the background on a picnic table at a campground in Sevierville, KY at dusk. I woke up the next morning not thrilled with the colors. They worked out well though for the Smokie mountain map and photos. I'll be adding some photos to the blue part of this page. I usually leave a tab when I want to tip something in, but I didn't know I was going to be adding this map. I used clear packing tape on both sides and it worked well.I forgot to paint the blue part before I taped it, so I put some masking tape over that section and smeared on oil pastel. By the way Sievierville is pronounced like severe ville. We speculated on and off for hours about how to pronounce it. 

Last one of the night. I'm finding that I do these in sets of three instead of one a day. That's a good thing because I was supposed to finish June 30. Fortunately we got an extension and have until July 14 to get them sent. This is another watercolor one which I embelished with gel pen. The background is water colored and then stamped with a stamp made from fun foam. I cut out the heart and glued it to the background. It seemed easier than trying to mask the heart and paint and stamp the background on the same paper. Black gouache again for a border. 

Another water color heart. I used black gouache as a border, mostly because I smudged the edge while I was painting it. The black covered it up great. I'm finding lots of uses for the gouache. 

More crazy quilt hearts. I saw a little felt bird online somewhere with a heart as a wing and decided to try one. I'll probably do a couple more of these in different media. This one is water color.