Mood Board Monday #12

Every week, Rebecca and I create a journal page spread based on a Mood Board we either create ourselves or find online. Be sure to check out Rebecca’s blog to see what she made! 

Wow! #12! This means there’s been 3 months of us creating every week! I’ve actually completed a sketchbook and had to get a new replacement (I’ll be doing a review for it soon!). This week is all about Valentine’s Day. I’m my own Valentine so I get to treat myself! I used some different supplies this week to branch out and try something new and like the result. I could keep working on it but don’t want to overdo it!  

I did want to mention I used Bleed Proof white by Dr Martins. The reason for this is because the Mermaid Markers are an ink that bleeds through most white paints. The bleed proof is made to go over inks and remain white. I looooove it and use it all the time. It rocks. Get yourself some at Hobby Lobby.  

I did the entire background with limited supplies on my lunch break. You can make some pretty cool art with just a few things... 

life is so much bigger now

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!

an update from the field

I thought I'd share with you some of the things I've been working on. 

I wish I could say the lack of posts/images/social media there-ness was because I wasn't doing anything, but the opposite is what's happened -- I'm busy all over the place and grabbing whatever creativity time I can! I'll draw and color in doctor's waiting rooms or in a long line at the drug store drive-up. My markers travel with me in their snazzy new case so I can color whenever I have some spare time between errands. My ink and brush come out when I have a free hour at home. There are so many ideas in my head, just not enough time to get them down! 

I'm sure this is true for a lot of you, too! Life seems to swirl around us, consume us like a tornado - we become caught and pulled along, landing far away from where we started. I think this is just how it is (I'm remiss to say normal as I'm learning there's no such thing and I don't want to live life striving for something that doesn't exist!). Life is life. 

Something I am learning is how important it is to strike out on your own journey. After writing my last post, I got to thinking about my year so far -- how it started with a car accident on New Year's Day and spiraled out of control after that. I was recently spoiled with Chipotle and got a cup with Neil Gaiman's two-minute story. He writes about refugees in the world, and how, one day, their lives simply and irrevocably changed. 

This had me thinking about my own life, and how it, too, was dramatically and significantly changed within a week. My entire landscape changed and I was drifting along as best I could. Sometimes I didn't know where I'd go, and when you're dealing with anxiety, well...it wasn't too good in my head there for awhile. 

The story, though, speaks about how we need to be a family -- all of us. And how we need people who will take us in and help us and love us, and damn if I'm not lucky to have had that happen to me. 

But there is something big I've learned from this. It's this: when we walk our authentic and true path towards the light, the universe wells up to help us glide along to bigger and better things. 

Is life super awesome and shiny? No. But I can see how little changes and decisions snowball into awesome things. The seed planted, when watered, will bloom. It all requires two things: patience & faith. If you have those, you're golden. If you have friends who are straight with you, you're platinum. 

Anyway, now that my new-to-me laptop has a proper amount of RAM in it, I'll be back to creating collage sheets and videos. In fact, this week is about getting the next Heart to Art posted & some a la carte mini video lessons filmed. So this is the perfect time to tell me how I can help you along your own journey -- is there a story I should tell, or journals to show, or images to share? Let me know!

Now to the pictures!

I'm working on getting these up in my Etsy shop as 11"x17" prints! Yep - I can go bigger, now! Which one do you like? 

That page on the left is for testing how colors will look next to each other, and how the shadows, done with grey, will look over the colors. Moleskine paper isn't the best thing for Copic markers!

I'm back to doodling in my Moleskine again. I decided to use the reference images I've collected on Pinterest and do some doodling. It turned into so much more than that. I had so much fun coloring her in and want to keep drawing. But seeing how well she turned out makes me nervous -- like I have to live up to this each time I draw. Do you ever feel like that? I think it's the perfectionist in most of us. I just have to remember that the only way to make more like this is to make more period. So I'll be trying to do one a day. We'll see how it goes.