Making healthy choices & focusing on healing lead me to my new passion of hand-lettering. It excites me and has me wanting to try more, experiment, and have fun! When I was working on this journal page, I knew I wanted a lot of colors & wanted to play with my Holbien gouache, but had no idea what to doodle or paint or draw.
But then it hit me -- I love words!
I've been writing since I was ten, and have written hundreds of thousands of words in novels, short stories, and articles (and before you ask, a lot of that is fanfiction I've been hiding from you because oh my God, what the heck is that girl doing?). Before I started visual journaling in 2005, I had resigned myself to a life of words, not images. I had tried and tried and just couldn't make good art. So I gave up and refocused my efforts elsewhere.
For me, lettering has been a way to marry these two passions of mine. So as I sat there trying to figure out what to paint, I decided to use the gouache to write thoughts or words.
And then layer them. Over and over again.
I doodled, too. And embraced layering -- you have to cover up some of what you really like to create something you love!
When I paint and listen to music, I get in the flow. That magical creative flow. It's kinda like how you always make it home when you've been caught up in your head while driving. You're just in the flow and the physical part -- that becomes automatic. I often step out of the flow with little idea of what I've been creating. This is where the magic is -- where your subconscious mind gets to talk to you, past filters and critics and urgent-yet-unimportant tasks that take up our days.
Because I'm always looking for content to share with you, I take a lot of pictures. This breaks the flow, sure, but I love the distance it affords me, to see where things are going. It helps me be a little more purposeful with my intentions and direct my efforts. Sometimes, when I share these WIP photos, people see things I missed, and that helps as well!
You know, I've really tried to write up all my feelings on this spread & where they came from, but I think the spread speaks for itself. So I'm just going to share pictures in the hope that someone else will see them and realize they can be happy, too!
