Get Messy Game

I have been off my art journalling game in a major way lately. It's partly because I was on the road for most of May and partly the general picking-up-the-pace that happens when cozy winter nights yield to seasons when leaving the house can actually be an enjoyable experience. Except this is DC, of course, so we had about two weeks of that before swamp season set in.

I am a bit bummed that I missed the Season of Brave entirely. And I'm reminded that once you get out of a habit, it gets harder and harder to jump back in. It's as true for art journaling as it is for exercise (did I really wake up at 6:45 to work out every weekday?!) or any other element of my routine.

So Vanessa's Get Messy game - instructions, each day of the week, for what to put on your page - came at the perfect time for me. The step-by-step process took out the intimidation factor and reminded me that this can be fun. I tend to want to come up with a Great Idea for a prompt and then make the vision come to life on the page - this taught me that you can play and experiment and make it up as you go along.

This isn't my favorite spread ever, but it was a lot of fun to make. (The flowers on the left side are not actually part of it, they're just hanging around from this page.) The journaling - "you mean it really can be that easy?!" - captures what this process felt like. And it's true of so much more than art journaling for me. I tend to overthink and to overcomplicate and to do things the hard way - but more often than not, it really can be that easy.

Get Messy Art Journal Blog Hop

Hi to everyone here for the blog hop! First off, I should say that the sharing aspect of the Get Messy group has been so much fun. It's like the grown-up, Internet equivalent of going to your mom or dad with a scribbled drawing and saying "Look what I made!" My boyfriend is doubtlessly appreciative that he is no longer the only one filling that role.

And not only do I love having people to show my work to, I love that the Get Messy group is making me make the work in the first place. This is the first time I've really done any art journaling and I'm so glad I jumped in. I'd been a bit intimidated - the art journals I'd seen previously all involved lots of mixed media and gesso (what is gesso?!) and technical skill. But seeing the diverse range of styles and techniques from the Get Messy group has been inspiring and empowering. Before this I mainly made minibooks, but I tended to do it when I had a big chunk of time to dive in and do something involved. I love that the group has me creating on a regular basis as part of my routine.

For the purpose of this post, I'm including everything I made over the course of the Season of Love. Like with children, it's hard to pick favorites. And also like with children, I will never tell which my real favorites are. ;) The original posts, with more thoughts on each of these spreads, are linked.

The first week is when I jumped in, put something on the page, and saw where it would take me. And realized this was going to be a lot less difficult and I lot more fun than I had expected.

I love how this captures, in a few words and photos, what my (sometimes mundane, sometimes romantic) domestic life looks like at the moment.

This one wins the award for best riff on a children's arts & crafts project - super fun putting a paper tree together.

This is for sure one of my favorites. I love that it's bright and graphic and fun - and I know I'll be glad one day that I captured all the silly things I love at 25.

This was the first time I tried using watercolor on a page and realized it wouldn't be the end of the world if it bled and wrinkled a bit. Aka I got messy. The journaling is pretty sprawling but it made my heart fill up to think of all the different people who've mattered to me over the course of my life.

This one is not my favorite design, but probably my favorite message - a love-yourself-first riff on that famous e.e. cummings poem for the public link-up.

I think this one may be the most meaningful to me. I loved that in the process of completing this page, I made a new connection about "where I get it from" in terms of expressing love. And I love the simple and graphic design.

This one is when I realized that politics and career issues are just as worthy topics for art journaling as love and feelings.

I love books and reading and I can think of a few other pages I'd like to make with quotes from my favorite authors... but for now, I love that the Bachelor, Virginia Woolf, and Raymond Carver could come out to play together in this spread.

And finally, this page is all about the magic of the selfie. And selfie-confidence and selfie-possession.

I'm still planning to catch up a bit on some of the prompts I missed but love that I'm ending the season with ten complete spreads telling a piece of my (love) story. I'm hoping to keep up with the prompts next season - I tend to have more crafting time in the winter months so I hope I don't fall off the wagon as the weather gets nicer and I emerge from hibernation. I'm also hoping to experiment more with some new techniques - and maybe even acquaint myself with gesso. ;)

Thanks so much for stopping by! You can visit the other ladies in the blog hop here:
Elizabeth / Sara / Cait / Julia / Cassandra / Kristin / Delaney

Get Messy: Self Portrait with Affirmations

         I loved the idea for this prompt, but a lot of affirmations make me feel a bit itchy. So I was struggling to think of what text to include around my selfie.

Then I remembered an experience I had when I was teaching art in Palestine. It was after work one day and we were out grocery shopping. In the evenings, I would often get stressed thinking about everything that had gone wrong in the classroom that day and my lesson plans for the next. Driving home, I started to feel the anxiety creeping in and began running through my inventory of Things to Worry About - but found myself coming up short. And then I heard a voice inside me that said "You have everything you need." Soon followed by "You are everything you need." Hippie stuff, I know, but true story. It reminded me of a passage in Eat, Pray, Love where Elizabeth Gilbert talks about being comforted and guided by a similar voice - something deep and wise that was both her and above her. Those words of affirmation will always have a special place in my heart. It is my own personal version of "you are enough."

This prompt also made me see the magic of self-portraiture. As awkward as it felt to smile and stare off into the distance, I love the result.  I love that it's me, after work, in my backyard, as I am. I am not too interested in taking a side in the Great Selfie Debate of the millenium- but I know in the future I will want to look back on pictures of myself. I have so many of my boyfriend, mostly as a backdrop for whatever meal we are eating, and comparatively few of myself. I think we all fantasize that we will date a photographer who will lovingly capture us as we are, and one day, when we are Secretary of State, Buzzfeed will discover the photos and run an article about how hot we were back in the day. (No? Just me then?) But until then, it's up to use to make sure we capture ourselves. If you wait around and hope that other people will take great pictures of you, you miss the opportunity to see yourself through your own lens.

I love that the photo and the text both capture that sense of self-possession and self-confidence and enoughness. This spread is super simple - just some flowers cut out from an old Rifle Paper catalogue and some letter cut-outs. Some of my favorite colors in clothing and in paper.

Get Messy: Author Quotes

I fell off the art journaling wagon over the past couple weeks, but I'm catching up and jumping back in. This one sat on my desk for over a week - I love reading so the quotes were easy, but the layout wasn't coming together for me until this afternoon when I dove in and started cutting and gluing and stamping.

I saw Birdman a couple weeks ago and the Raymond Carver quote that it opens with stuck with me. It reminded me of one of my favorite Virginia Woolf quotes, from To the Lighthouse:

And did you get what 
you wanted from this life, even so? 
I did. 
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself 
beloved on the earth. (Carver)

But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed, not only here, but all over the world. (Woolf)

They express something similar: this compelling need to be loved not just by your friends and family, or in your immediate surroundings, but everywhere. That need gets expressed in a thirst for fame and accomplishment and world renown.

Love, fame, power. I think we crave fame, on some level, because it is like the ultimate experience of love. If we're famous, it's because everyone knows and loves us. And if everyone knows and loves us, we can never die. It's hard to get more fundamentally human than that. Perhaps some people are drawn to fame more by a thirst for power than a thirst for love, but I imagine it comes from a similar place - people don't have to love you if they fear you.

What better modern-day expression of that is there than the Bachelor? It's the ultimate intersection of the desire for fame and the desire for love - not just by the bachelor or by the contestants but by viewers across America. So this week heavily features the Bachelor crew and a few other celebrities, inspired in large part by an US Weekly that my boyfriend supplied me with. I used some clippings from a National Geographic travel catalogue to get at the sense of global scope, and I finished it off with some stars. (Do you see what I did there?!)

I am completely smitten with this. Any spread where Virginia Woolf and Farmer Chris sit side-by-side is okay in my book.

Get Messy: The greatest act of love in history

   I work in international democratic development. (Say that five times fast and you'll have an idea of how hard it is to explain my job to people.) As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about democratic transitions and what makes them succeed or fail. When I was in Tunisia for the presidential elections this fall, it struck me that people who were imprisoned in the interior ministry under the old regime were competing - peacefully and democratically - against people who had worked in the interior ministry under the old regime.

So when I got to thinking about the greatest act of love in history for this week's prompt, I thought of the great leaders who have acted selflessly to move the country forward after civil conflict and during political transitions. I thought of leaders like Nelson Mandela in South Africa and members of the political class in Tunisia, who were imprisoned for many years for advocating for a freer country. When they were released, they could have enacted revenge for what they went through and passed political exclusion laws - but instead, they forgave their oppressors, allowed them to participate in politics, and moved the country forward. I know that I am oversimplifying very complicated stories. And I don't know whether it was love of country or love of humanity or political wisdom or a concern for their legacy - or maybe something else entirely - that drove those leaders. But to me those are tremendous acts of forgiveness and love.

Nothing too fancy here - I used vertical lines of brush script, one of the limited tools in my creative toolbox, to convey the feeling of prison bars and chopped up my photos to continue the effect.

Get Messy: Love Notes

This started as a love note to my boyfriend and turned into a love note to my mom. The journaling says it all:

In the past couple years, I've gotten into the habit of hiding a note for Austin somewhere in the house – in the fridge or in a drawer – before I leave on a trip, or in his suitcase when he's the one traveling. And he does the same. Sometimes they're beautiful letterpress cards but more often they're post-its with a stamp. I love that I can remind him I’m thinking of him when one of us is away. It's one of my favorite traditions – and I just realized I get it from my mom. When I was a kid, she would leave us little notes and gifts in our bags to discover when we went away, like on a camping trip with my dad. Pretty cool that I learned to express love in some of the same ways she does.

A few years ago, I remember one of my aunts saying that my grandmother had taught her how to love. I was so touched by that and I had it in the back of my mind while working on this. And it's true, isn't it, that our parents pass on their own love languages to us.

As you can probably imagine, this was so easy to pull together and I love the modern, graphic look. (Alternate title for this post was "not your mother's art journaling.") I thought of hiding a secret note to my boyfriend under the post-its but jettisoned that when I switched gears with the journaling. All of the stamps are from Elise Joy (currently available as digital downloads from her shop) except for one (I think you can figure out which) from Lydia & Pugs.

Get Messy Season of Love (Week Two, Part Two)

After finishing part one, I was in the mode of printing, stamping, and cropping photos, so I continued in a similar vein for this one. This time, I kept the photos rectangular for a snapshot effect. I made them black and white to keep them from competing with each other and turned to the backgrounds for color. Super simple but I love the graphic black text over the watercolor wash. The pages in the Moleskine cahier notebook I'm using are pretty thin, but they held the watercolor well enough for my purposes. I may switch to something thicker though if I keep finding I want to paint.

For the journaling, in the spirit of the "100 people" prompt, I went for quantity and wrote about all the people I've loved at different phases in my life. (Only a small percentage of whom are pictured here.) Pretty cool that once you start thinking about people you love it takes a while to run out.  

Get Messy public link-up: February

Full disclosure, I had the idea for this spread before the public link-up prompt went out. The prompt was What is the one thing you most want your children (real or imaginary) to know about love?

I was thinking about the e.e. cummings prompt from last week and how much I love this poem. But these words don't exactly ring true for me. Because I like my body all (or almost all) of the time, not just when seen through the mirror of another person. I am lucky to never have seriously struggled with body image issues (and I truly think it is luck rather than strength of character or anything like that, and I have so much compassion for those who do struggle). And I appreciate my body even more nowadays. Bar Method shows me day after day that strong, healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes, including mine. So the "when it is with your body" is crossed out (kind of hard to tell here since it's in gold paint).

I realized along the way that this idea fits perfectly with the prompt. Because above all, what I want to impart to my future children is how to be comfortable in their own skin and in their own heads. To love themselves first before sharing that love with anyone else.

Get Messy Season of Love (Week Two, Part One)

When I was about 10, I wrote out a bunch of lists in a notebook - things I wanted to be when I grew up, favorite books, stuff like that. One of them was a list of my favorite things, which I remember included reading, bouncy balls, coffee ice cream, and the color aqua. I got to the end of the list and thought "Hey, I'm pretty interesting!" Because what could possibly be more interesting than those? ;)

The 100 things challenge for this week's Get Messy prompt was like a grown-up equivalent of that. Pretty fun to make a list of all the stuff I love that, deep or superficial, contribute to making me who I am. I may or may not have included ten separate entries related to Mexican food. And the photos make it clear that my favorite things are plants, food, and alcohol.

The light-hearted topic seemed to call for something colorful and photo-heavy. Thus far, my art journaling style seems to be a bit scrapbooky, clean and with lots of photos. I didn't draw on either of the art prompts this week because I don't have a sewing machine and the e.e. cummings poems (which I love) didn't quite fit with what I had in mind. But I'm excited to use the prompts to stretch out of my art journaling comfort zone going forward.

     I couldn't fit all 100 things on the spread, so I included some overflow on the next page to make sure I got everything down. (I'm at 95, still ruminating on the last five). I actually finished the pages for the "people you love" prompt as well, but not until the sun had set, so I'll post that later this week. This is too much fun - excited to keep up with the group.

Getting messy

So it would seem that my blog has done a 180 from what I originally intended for it. What was meant to be a travel blog when I was volunteering in Palestine appears to have evolved into all crafts, all the time. But the one actually has the roots in the other.

I was accepted to the internship in Palestine as an arts and crafts teacher - a fact I found equal parts hilarious and terrifying because I was sure I didn't have a creative bone in my body. But I really wanted to go to the West Bank, so I was all in. I signed up for a Pinterest account and started pinning kids' arts and crafts ideas. I stayed up late prepping craft projects so they'd be easy to tackle for a group of rowdy nine-year-olds. And along the way, I became enthralled with art journals on Pinterest and started craving a creative space of my own. As my travels came to a close, I wrote a 23 at 23 list (I had also started reading blogs while abroad) and one of the items was "start an art journal."

Since then, I've scratched that creative itch through minibooks and some careful, controlled art journaling. But now I'm ready to dive in head-first. The daily cards gave me a big boost. And I think I've been successful at them (so far) because of the structure of creating every day and the accountability of sharing online. So when I came across the Get Messy group, I was excited about the prompts and about the gentle push to make at least a couple pages every week.

So without further ado... here are my spreads for the first week of the Season of Love!

Some of the text intentionally smudged - I'm still working out the boundaries of what I'm comfortable sharing online.

Spoiler alert, a blank spread in a notebook - and the goal of expressing something a bit more personal - is a lot more intimidating than a plastic playing card. But if there's one thing I've learned from the cards, it's that the antidote to "out of ideas" is to sit down and start moving your hands and picking up paper. This spread started with the washi tape heart and then one thing lead to another until I had a full spread. The tools in my creative toolbox are still somewhat limited, but since taking Kal's script school I have loved brush script, so I gravitated back to that. I think there's something to be said for applying old, comfortable techniques as you're getting used to new, unfamiliar formats.

       I am usually all about the bright colors, and the next two pages are more reflective of that. After the first page broke the ice, these felt fun and easy. I realized as I was making it that the paper tree is not unlike an art project I taught to the kids in Palestine - and I love that it secretly harkens back to where this all began.