honoring the

Daily Simple Things

hello lovely creative!

After last week's fairly minimalist page, it's time for something brighter and busier, with plenty of collage and colorful layers! This uplifting page is all about noticing the simple joys in your life and letting gratitude fill your heart. I’ve filmed the whole process and I’m sharing it inside my online class The Artist & the Journal!

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably noticed that gratitude is an important part of my creative process. It shows up again and again as a theme in my work, and especially in my art journal: I have created plenty of gratitude pages over the years, and the holidays are an especially wonderful time to reflect back and give thanks.

And not just for the big stuff! Because it's very easy to give thanks for the big, out-of-the-ordinary things when they happen: goals reached, life-changing turning points, big events and happy news… But it's also very easy to overlook the little blessings of every day life: a nice meal, a comfy pillow, reasonably good health, a ray of sunshine... We get used to them and we might take them for granted, but what if we realized how important they are to living a happy life? What an amazing gift, to have good things that we can count on day after day! To me, this beats all the Christmas presents in the world.⁠

… not a wish-list, but a thank you list! This is what I started with for this page: filling a whole page in a notebook with little things I love. As I was writing, the song “My Favorite Things” from the Sound of Music kept playing in my head (it was such a favorite movie as a kid), so I printed out the lyrics and used them in my background!

Then I looked through personal photos and magazines, and gathered plenty of images to start filling my page with the things I love: rose petals, fairy lights, ladders, windows, house-plants, paint brushes, little birds and a nice cup of coffee… As I was looking for images, plenty more ideas came up that I added to my list: birdhouses, chocolate, a hot bath… it’s hard to stop once you start noticing all the loveliness in your life!

If you start making your own list, I’m sure you’ll add some things that are completely unique to you. And don’t worry if some of them might feel a bit silly! One thing that I really wanted to add to my page, was a picture of my favorite pair of boots, and here is the story why: one of my favorite times of the year, is that day in autumn when it finally gets cold enough to start wearing boots again… I love to wear boots, and every year I look forward to that “Happy Boots Day”! These boots in particular, are my favorite pair of all. Apart from the fact that they’re super comfy, they hold a special meaning for me: they’re by a brand called ART and I purchased them when I was just getting started on my creative journey. So pretty soon I started calling them my “artist boots”, and every time I put them on, they give me a boost of confidence: I feel ready to step boldly onto my chosen path as an artist!

What about you? Is there anything in your daily life that holds special meaning to you, and that you could add to your list? An art journal is the perfect place to express and honor those personal stories. It’s uplifting and fun!

Last year I did a page about “rain, tea and a good book”, and I loved it so much that I wanted to do it again and share this process. I love the idea of highlighting three favorite things. It reminds me of the gratitude practice we do with my kids at bedtime, where we give thanks for all the good things of the day. They’re teenagers now but we still do it and it is so lovely. Day after day, year after year, it makes them realize that the more appreciation you show for the good things in your life, the more good things will show up!

So I typed my whole list in a Word document, in a variety of fonts and sizes. Then from all the elements on my page, I chose three that felt (and sounded!) good together, and I cut them out. The bonus is that I now have plenty of printed words left, and they could be the starting point of many more pages!

Apart from boots, I chose paintbrushes and fairy-lights. I love the softness of paint brushes, and when I look at them on my table, they feel like a big bouquet of possibility!

And I just love fairy lights. There are plenty in my studio, plus it’s almost Xmas now, so they are all around the house, inside and outside, and I can see them twinkling through the window. of my studio. I love the words “fairy-lights” too, they sound so poetic…

I had so much fun creating this page, it felt really free, joyful and intuitive, simply bringing to the page all the things that I love: not only the words and images, but also my favorite colors, art supplies and materials. I would love to share this process with you in The Artist & the Journal and see all the ways that you can make it yours!

And since this is all about gratitude, here is a big THANK YOU for being on this journey with me! Stay tuned because I will soon be creating my “word of the year” page, like I do every year, and share it all with you.

I wish you a lovely, bright and joyful day, full of the things and the people you love!

Join me in a magical adventure through mixed media art journaling! Get your journal started and discover how this fulfilling creative practice can boost your wellbeing and creativity!

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