Dare to bloom

Art journaling challenge - Page 5

Here comes the fifth page in my Art Journaling Challenge! Which means I’m half-way through, yay! (celebrating with a silly happy dance right there on my chair…)

I set this goal for myself as a fun and exciting way to get back to my art journaling practice, and I’m so happy this is proving fruitful. Not only that, but the added bonus I had not anticipated is that this adventure has also made me embrace my blogging practice all over again! So a big thank you to all of you who are reading me and leaving encouraging comments. This means SO much to me.

The Art Journaling Challenge:

I’ve decided to finish my current art journal by the end of the year so I can start a brand new one on January 1st! I’ll be sharing the pages each week and you’re invited to follow along. You can even set your own goal to end the year in a creative way!

And to celebrate, I will reopen enrollment for my art journaling class, The Artist & the Journal, in the first week of January too.

If you’ve been following along, you might remember this “purple gradient” starting point I shared earlier HERE. At the time I wondered if I would use this as a basis for a landscape or a floral…

I hesitated for a while and finally decided to start building up the bottom of the page with some collage. No matter what it would turn out to be, this would ground the painting. This is something I do a lot in my art, and I’ve noticed it especially in my journal because it is so much chunkier and heavier at the bottom than at the top!

I chose papers in the same color palette as my background. And while I was rummaging through my basket of papers (my basket of serendipity, as I call it), I happened upon a black & white image of a poppy I had printed a looooong time ago. This is the same print I had used for an image transfer in one of my very early paintings and it instantly clicked: instead of choosing between a landscape and a floral, I would have a landscape with a flower growing on it!

I glued all my papers to the page, then blended them a bit with the same paints and inks I had used in the previous layer, using my fingers, a palette knife and the same large flat brush I use for pretty much everything:

Then it was time to transfer my poppy image onto the page! I love image transfers, they’re so much fun and always make the little girl in me so happy. I don’t mind that some parts break and don’t transfer perfectly, on the contrary. Here it helped me simplify the image a bit and make it mine.

Then I blended the bottom of the image to “plant” my poppy and really ground it so it could grow and bloom with confidence!

That sort of “hill” behind it bothered me. It felt too flat. I did like the idea of something higher than the rest of the horizon line, but it didn’t feel right, so I covered it up with more of that light turquoise I love so much.

And I added some to the left for good measure. But then the whole page felt very dull apart from that turquoise, so I decided to brighten things up with a few more pieces of collage.

I blended those again with paint, inks and crayons. It didn’t feel right though, and I overworked it a bit, then I realized those brighter colors were the problem. Originally, I had liked the slightly moody atmosphere of the page, with the poppy flower bravely blooming through the mist.

So I went back to my original color scheme, toning down the warm colors and bringing back some of that lovely purple. It still feels colorful, but more harmonious. And I like to imagine the poppy soaking up the color from the nurturing soil… I have a feeling it will not stay white very long!

I also added some alcohol inks to create movement and some white swirls inspired by my original poppy painting. Then it felt almost complete and all that was missing was some more intuitive journaling in the white area on the left page. I had known from the start this would be a perfect place-holder for writing, which is something I very often do right at the end of the process.

Staying grounded is not always easy for me, I sometimes tend to live too much in my head. But creativity, and especially creating with my hands, is one of the things that really help. The poppy is a wonderful symbol for me here, because it is one of those flowers that wither really fast if you cut them, sometimes in a matter of minutes. They need to stay planted, grounded, anchored into the earth to bloom and offer their beauty to the world.

And so my page was complete! Here is another look at how it evolved:

My journal is getting chunkier by the day and there are just a few more pages to go to complete it! Thank you so much for following along. And thank you for blooming in your own unique way!