Diving into my art journal

I've been doing lots of stitching lately, and missing the art journaling side of me... and it seems when I concentrate on paper arts, I miss the stitching! I need to make time to do both :-)
I did 2 things to get myself back into the art journaling groove. First was a re-organisation of my collage elements

- I took the advice of Barbara Hagerty and now have piles of collage images arranged by size. Along the way I had a good purge of images that no longer make me feel excited, and I couldn't wait to get started with what I had re-discovered.
I also decided to take another online class with Kelly Kilmer - previously I've taken A Prompt A Day and A Life made by Hand with her. This time I'm doing The Journey Within : A Guide to Unlocking your Creativity. I love Kelly's blog - she posts daily and her art journal pages speak to me. She is a great advocate of journaling every day, and is always encouraging. Here's a quote from one of her posts : "the more you play, practice and experiment, the more you learn and evolve. Your pages will grow and change as you do. You won't love every page and that's okay. It's all a part of the process. Don't waste time beating yourself up over pages you don't love. Push yourself until you can't go any farther, then turn the page. You have a whole book to fill!"
I signed up for her class on the weekend, read the class material, and that was enough to get myself over my 'block' about 2 pages in my FTB journal.

I like the interplay of black & white on the above page which is part of the "Anna Karenina" movie if you've seen it. LOVE chandeliers and butterflies so happy to have included both.
I hadn't been able to start the below page for the longest time - the base page had the flower faces which I wanted to include but wasn't sure how. Decided that I would just start laying down some paper, and then found the image of the paint covered baby in my newly-sorted pile of images. That inspired me to add some colouring with inktense pencils and a neocolor crayon.

And after that the page just came together.

They're not the best pages I've ever made, but now they're done and I can move onto the next spread knowing I've beaten the blocks.
Will show you more as I actually get to work on the lessons! Finished something else on the weekend

...full reveal on Friday