Emotions Rising & Falling
Emotions Rising & Falling
Art journaling challenge - Page 8
After moving my creative corner to the living room, and then to my parents’ place (while our heating system is being changed), I finally have access to my computer again, yay! Which means I can now share the latest page of my Art Journaling Challenge! And I also have a really cool invitation for you at the end of this post…
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’m 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!
River, trees & birds…
I love that I can take my art journal anywhere with just a few supplies, and keep making art no matter where I am. Here is a peek at the tiny creative nook where I created this page.
My parents live by a lovely river with plenty of trees and birds, and I could see them as I painted. The river is flooding at the moment and I watched it rise day after day, coming closer and closer to the garden wall! No doubt this was part of my inspiration for this page.
starlings in my garden
Something else I had in mind ever since I collaged this image of trees, was to have birds taking flight from the branches. We have a gigantic Chestnut Tree at the back of our garden and every night at sunset, hundreds of starlings gather at the top and sing! It is completely magical to watch take off, dive and swirl together as though dancing in the sky, then land on the branches again, more and more numerous each time.
Here they are, click play to watch them fly!
So, back to my journal! If you watched the video in this post you might remember that my starting point looked like this:
The page already had a clear, structured composition and with so much inspiration to draw from, all I had to do was let it unfold with more and more layers. I had an image of starlings on my table and the cut-out word “retreat”. At some point I added them both to the page but then decided to remove them and just kept them nearby for inspiration.
I took the word “retreat” as an invitation to slow down, contemplate nature, appreciate the quiet of this place (compared to the noise and smells of the works going on in our house!). The rectangle on the right felt like a blank page, ready for some writing, so this is where I started. Then I added more elements of collage, building up the story with an image of a window (a recurring symbol that shows up again and again in my journal) and adding some texture with a piece of thin gauze and some scraps of paper.
I kept working on the page with some paints and inks, then added the flock of birds with a stencil (for those who will undoubtedly wonder, it’s from the Crafters Workshop). The gauze at the bottom started to look like a river, or maybe a wave…
Even though I didn’t add the word “retreat” after all, I liked the idea of having some large cut-out words on the page. I have a box full of them so I took it out and played for a while until these came together:
Emotions rising & falling… just like the birds in the sky, the ebb and flow of emotions, sometimes rising like a wave, flooding like a river, then retreating again.
The window became a door and the page was almost complete. It just needed a few finishing touches of color in drips and splatters, and a little more journaling to embed those reflections into the page.
Here is the finished page:
And here is how it evolved from start to finish:
My art journal is such a special, intimate space to express emotions, process them and honor them without judgement. Sometimes we just bury our emotions deep down, we’re not always able to handle them and express them in the rush of everyday life. So maybe the most important part of this creative practice is that it makes me take the time to look at my inner life, sit with the emotions, learn from them and remember that they have so much guidance to offer if I pay attention.
Stay tuned for the new pages coming up really soon! You can share your pictures in the comments.
Light & love,
Keep in touch
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LET’S ART JOURNAL TOGETHER!
The practice of Art Journaling has had such an amazing, positive impact on my life as an artist. It has made me grow in new and unexpected ways, and I’m excited to share it with you in The Artist & the Journal!