An Old Photo of my Parents

Olive and DonI don’t have many old photos of my parents that are useable. They are mostly tiny pictures, sepia and often blurry! Disappointing for an art journaler! My parents were quite old when they had me, having already had four children and thinking they’d finished, and then 8 years later, I came along! Anyway, I did have this photo and, thank God for photoshop, I was able to blow it up and tweak it a bit to make it useable. This is an A4 size journal (Strathmore mixed media, it’s the best!) so I increased the size of the photo a lot and it worked out quite well except their feet are blurry. On the top left I had collaged a piece of an old sheet music cover, one of my mother’s favourite songs, and on the right is a copy of her handwritten music manuscript of an old hymn, “Lead me to Calvary”. Fortunately I have one old song book of hers with several examples of her writing in the back and front. Both of these collaged pieces were not the originals, but photocopies, so I ripped the edges and painted them with Nickel Azo gold paint to make them look old. Then I stuck on a cupid and a 1930’s fashion drawing. I collaged around the edges with 2 small paper doilies sprayed with brown ink, and some pieces of coffee coloured scrapbooking paper. Before I collaged anything I had used a flower stencil and some brown dylusions spray on the background. So there you go, that was a bit of a reverse chronological explanation of how I made this page. Oh yes, then I wrote something about my parents who had a successful and happy relationship for 60 years.

I have not used this blog much in the last year or so because this wordpress site seems so slow to upload and often times out. So I’ve been very frustrated with it! I intend to make more of an effort to post more in coming months! Love and light to you all.

My first post

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Hello and welcome to my blog! I would love to share some of my art journaling journey with you. I’ve just discovered art journaling through attending some classes in Byron Bay with Zom Osborne , starting in September last year. You can visit her blog here.

I think it’s wonderful that art journalers can now connect and share with each other through the internet and blogging, and I want to be part of it. I hope you will come back from time to time and check out what I have been doing, and I invite you to comment if you feel to.

This is one of the first pages I made in the class with Zom. We brought in a photocopy of a photo of ourselves (this is me at 4 or 5 years old) and then painted it/altered it in some way.

Magical Child page

 

That is a photo of my parents at their wedding on the right. I was the 5th child in the family and was born quite a long time (8 years) after the first 4 and I was unplanned, so “appeared as if by magic”.

The quote at the top by the Irish mystic John O’Donohue says” May you realise that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here”. I think that I was affirming that even though I was an unplanned baby, I nevertheless have a right to be here, that I, like all of us, bring my own uniqueness to the world.