Thursday, May 29, 2014

Art Journaling a Woven Page

I'm really late posting about my last Positively Creative Art Journaling assignment. This is actually from, not this last Sunday, but the Sunday before. I did finish it up last Sunday and was ready to post about it yesterday only to have no internet service the entire day. But I'm here now! We start with the paper above, one that was supposed to collect the paint removed with plastic wrap in an earlier lesson. So little paint transferred that I've been using it ever since to blot brushes and bubble wrap and alphabet stamps. Now we get to tear it into narrow strips for weaving.


Do you remember weaving baskets from construction paper in grade school? That's what this exercise reminded me of. The instruction here recommended also tearing colorful strips from magazines or other painted paper, but my book is so small I had plenty of strips and didn't necessarily want to jazz things up any. 


We were only to use one page as opposed to a page spread, but again because of the small size of my book, I knew I would need both sides. And I had more of that page left to rip up so did so in small irregular chunks to add to the other side of the spread. Both the woven strips and the chunks got glued down and painted over with a diluted coat of paint. I really questioned being able to write over the woven side as the exposed edges curled right up. But I figured it must be possible or Dale Ann would not have asked us to do it.


So I was right on track time-wise to start my journaling...but found myself hesitating. I was feeling a strong urge to add an interesting border, not just write and write. Was leaning towards a Zentangle, but feeling short on time to look through my little reference notebook for something suitable. I suppose I could start with the journaling, just leave room around the edges for the border to be added later. But I also found myself putting off the journaling itself because of the prompt: List 10 things you convince yourself you don't have time to do...and then do one of them and journal about how that feels. Well, coming up with the 10 things wasn't hard. But that following week was one in which I felt under a time crunch, one in which I felt I must do these other things and only sigh at what I really wanted to be doing. So if I wrote down my ten things, I'd have to carve out time to do one of them and I couldn't bring myself to do it. Plus I wanted that fancy border! So that is why this is so late in getting blogged about. And finishing up the journal page including adding the Zentangle border took care of TWO things on my list. Ok, maybe that was a bit of a cheat, but I'm still under a time crunch!

Forgive me for blurring my journaling again, but it IS personal journaling, after all. There were only a few spots where the pen hung up on the woven part of the page. I hope you can see how nice the right side looks now that the writing is on it. This is one of the harder lessons for me to learn about creating these backgrounds for the journaling. To me they often look so horrible by themselves, yet rather nice once things are added over them.

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