I still have a small backlog of journal pages that I want to post about before I am up to date. This first one I called “science  fiction fan” When I was younger I used to read quite a bit of Sci Fi, when I was at Uni and up until my early thirties. I don’t read it much these days, though I do still enjoy a good sci fi movie. In our art journaling class Zom gave us a prompt to write about some UNUSUAL things that we were into. Sci Fi was one of the things I thought of because it is usually read more by men/boys than women. At least I imagine it is. Anyway, her prompt got me thinking and so I ended up writing a piece about my history of being an SF fan starting with watching Superman and The Twilight Zone as a child, and reminiscing about some of the great books I have read. I pasted this little essay around the edges as a border.

It seems appropriate that I am using my first ever art journal to answer the question “Who am I?” in myriad ways. But I suppose that is mostly what people are doing in their art journals, exploring aspects of themselves.

Another prompt that we were given was, if you had another lifetime what would you study? An interesting question, with of course, more than one answer! I made a whole list of things, but the one I chose to make a page about was “Ancient Mysteries”. Here it is:

The reason I chose this one was because I had already created this background, and it looked kind of ancient and seemed to fit. We made the background in the art journaling class in this way: 1. we ripped pages from old encyclopedias that had something to do with the prompt ie, what you would like to study, and stuck them down..

2. Then we stamped over them with gesso using some of Zom’s home made foam stamps.  3. We painted all over with one colour (I used burnt umber), and wiped some of it off so you could see the stamped patterns.  4. When dry, we painted a second colour over all and rubbed that back too. (I used gold)

I LOVED this background, but I thought it was so beautiful I’d never want to put anything over it! And what would show up on such a busy background anyway!?

After a couple of weeks I went ahead with the Ancient Mysteries theme and I liked how it turned out. I printed out some writing I did about the topic and made the paper look like old parchment by painting it with a wet tea bag and ripping/burning the edges. This was really lots of FUN. I had a feeling that black and white writing would stand out the best for the heading and I think that worked quite well.

Looking at both of these pages it is a little bit like they are school projects, with the big fancy headings and pictures and writing stuck down. I guess that’s Ok, I don’t really mind that. This journal is primarily for me, and I’m happy with these pages, I like the way they look and I got a lot out of the actual process of exploring these parts of me.