Daily journaling

Even when I don't manage to keep up with actual daily journaling, I always manage to keep notes of my happenings. Today I got up to date and can share my next completed spread in my daily art journal. Started with a page that featured quite a lot of text in the background, so began with watersoluble crayons, blended with white gesso to give a pastel layer and subdue the background enough to write over. If I'd used clear gesso, that would have still sealed the crayons but made the layer brighter.

Quite a bit happened this past week. One of these was that I did Kelly Rae's "Wear your Joy" class through Brave Girl University. They have some awesome classes offered, and if you're home on holiday and have the time I recommend giving their offerings a look (interestingly, this is a cheaper way of getting this particular class than going through Kelly Rae's blog link).
If you've read anything about this project on Kelly Rae's blog, you won't be surprised that her approach is about positive self-talk and celebrating your body by dressing joyfully, rather than putting together perfect outfits. For a few months now, I've been taking photos of myself every day to inspire me on days when I can't think of what to wear. After doing this for a couple of months I noticed that I feel more comfortable about doing this, I'm enjoying finding different combinations of clothes to wear, it's easier to find things to wear in the morning, and I'm loving my body more even though I'm not "Model" sized. These photos are summer holiday fashion for me. After doing Kelly Rae's class, I'm now photographing myself to include my smile. 

The other thing Kelly Rae had in the class was encouragement to write our own Joy FULL manifesto - see her original here. I quite liked the idea, and decided to adapt it and capture some "truths" of my current thinking. I printed them on some pretty paper - the drawings in the background are therefore not mine, but the tapa stencil and words are :-)

Click on any photo if you want to see/read it larger.

It's fun to find things like this that inspire you and can be done in a small way (by which I mean not taking as much time as making a full canvas would) to add to a page of daily journaling.

I have been wishing that we had Ikea here so I could get a groovy art trolley - this week it suddenly dawned on me that I could probably buy an alternative here - and indeed I purchased a cheap trolley at The Warehouse for $25 that does the job of holding all my (from the top down) acrylic paints, metallic/iridescent paints and alcohol inks, sprays, watercolours and other inks. No idea why this thought never crossed my mind before!!

They are all together - portable on wheels - and I now have a couple of spare shelves in my studio that I need to have time to reorganise. I also went through a whole lot of old calendars that I'd been hanging on to, and cut out just month and day headings, and kept a few numberings. Hence I added January to my first page above (that is the Maori translation below) and the word Thursday to my second - I like to try & enter my day/date in different ways.

As you can see, this page also had a lot of text. If you click on the photo you will see that my journaling is a bit tricky to read in parts. Therefore I wanted a different look for the rest of the page and glued down some under paper (plain paper which lies under and alongside my projects to capture ink and paint as I work) - I like that the text still shows through a bit.

I want each of these spreads to have some kind of art featured - a prompt or an actual art lesson or idea as you saw above. I have been inspired by Documented Life to make more art cards. They are small pieces of art that I can collage, add found words, and stitch on. Excited to see how these progress. I had been gathering collage words for my next Life Book project, and decided that this went perfectly with my joy thoughts of the previous page...I started with a card previously gelli-printed - adding texture with stitch over a glittery fibre ribbon, and some gold paint on a handmade stamp

And we finished our week yesterday with a fun road trip up the mountain

We had brilliant sunshine - very little snow to be seen on our trip up the chair lift. 

And we did a couple of great walks

With stunning views

Beautiful New Zealand - this all only 2 1/2 hours away from my home. I know I keep saying it, but feel so lucky to live here.
So that was rather a long post about my Daily journaling spread for this past week. I like the detail for myself to remember how I did certain elements, but also to inspire you to either start daily journaling, or to see some different idea to add to yours. 
Have a great creative week - whatever that means in your life.

You can see my Flickr album with all my daily journaling spreads HERE.