Hello sweet creative!

I have just finished filming my third and final lesson for Life Book 2023! This mixed media art journal page is all about hopes and dreams, growing your wings and embracing your inner fairy.

Before I tell you more: it’s not too late to jump into Life Book! This super uplifting, year-long mixed media course is hosted by the magical Tam Laporte and it's always such a joy for me to be part of the teaching team. Plenty of amazing lessons are waiting for you in the classroom already, with lots more to come every month.

In my previous journal, I have a very similar page to this new one, and I’ve had so many requests to teach a lesson about it that I thought, why not? I love to re-explore ideas in my journal, and use past pages as a source of inspiration to start new ones. Whenever I do, I know that despite the similarities, the story will always unfold in a new and different way, which I love!

Here is the original page from my other journal:

They really feel like sisters! But to me, this first one tells a different story, and you can read about it in this blog post. I’ve only just realized that I painted the first page exactly a year before creating the new one.

And this one is all about Hope: a fairy stands in front of the horizon, her soul full of dreams and wishes, wondering what she will find on the other side. That was my initial idea. Then little by little, as I built the layers of the landscape, it felt more and more snowy. On a whim I added bare branches, which made it really feel like winter, a dormant land, waiting to come back to life.

And the fairy, with her golden and colorful wings, became a fairy of Spring! A bird landed on her hand, and it feels like her little helper, her messenger. Maybe she’s going to send it ahead of her, over the horizon, to announce that spring is coming…

As it turns out, the quotes on my two pages are both by Emily Dickinson. And here is the full poem:

I am loving the spring energy these days, flowers are blooming all over the place and a family of great tits are nesting in a birdhouse right by my window, so that I can see them going back and forth all day long, carrying bits of moss, and quite a lot of fluffy cat hair! It’s such a sweet sight.

The days are longer and I love to go into the garden just before sunrise, in the crisp, bluish air, with a hot cup of tea in my hands.

I love how the cycles of Nature remind us that, no matter the ups and downs of life, light and joy always come back, more abundant, beautiful and colorful than we remembered. And that’s what Hope is about.

If you’d like to see the making of this page from start to finish and learn every little detail of the process, then jump into Life Book! This lesson will be released in the classroom a few months from now, and until then, there are plenty more delicious lessons for you to explore:

What if we filled our art journal with little hiding places: flaps, pockets and even a mini junk journal, to hold our dreams, our stories and the secrets of our hearts?

Leave a comment for me!