I’ve been journaling on the same page for a week, and then turning it into art. I really like this practice, so I’m going to keep doing it each week. Here are my last three weeks.
Tag: acrylic
Symbol Dictionary
I have been working through Effy Wild’s May FB Wilderhood challenge which includes creating my own personal symbol dictionary, but also exploring what symbols mean to me personally. As part of that process, I signed up for Tangie Baxter’s Symbology Project Workshops and have been doing one page a day. I’ve always wanted to learn more about symbology, but always felt too stupid to “get” it and had a lot of trouble trying to keep what all those symbols were supposed to mean in my head.
So, I’m really loving exploring my own personal meaning through the course instead of researching what something means through researching it in someone else’s book or on the internet. I’ve found that these symbols hold very deep personal meaning to me, which I had not been aware of before, and it makes me feel like I “get” it now on a personal level. It feels good to know there is no need right now to research what others think about a symbol in order to get it “right.” The process has added an entirely new layer to my life and my work.
Below is my take on the symbol dictionary Effy created in her class. I LOVE how it turned out. It has my favorite colors and textures and includes a lot of the symbols that show up in my creative work again and again. I’m planning on adding it to the front of my Moonshine art journal soon, but I love looking at it every day on my art desk. For the amazing texture on the folders, I used two of my favorite Sarah Trumpp stencils along with acrylic paint. The folders are made out of torn sheets of watercolor that are stitched together. The cards are made out of watercolor paper that I painted with acrylic on one side and watercolor on the other, and then cut out with decorative scissors. Then I used stamps or hand drew the symbols that show up most often in my work. The total size of the dictionary is 8″ x 8″.
Full Pink Moon 2019 Art Journal Spread
I’ve been participating in Effy Wild’s Moonshine course since January. I love how it’s helped me become more aware of the moon’s cycles. I’ve noticed that since I’ve created a ritual around creating at new moon and full moon each month, I receive visions tied to them each month. When a vision comes to me, which usually happens a few days before new moon and full moon, I try to get down a rough sketch, and then I just let my mind work for the next few days on how to translate what I’ve been shown onto paper.
Below is my full pink moon art journal spread. It is a bit different than the vision I received. In the vision, I saw a woman curled up inside the center of a fully-bloomed rose which was encased in a full pink moon. For this spread, I covered the page with gesso. Once dried, I sprayed it with water and added several different colors of Brusho crystals. I then created a moon mask with cardstock and painted the remainder of the page with black and payne’s gray acrylic paint. I sprayed gold and white acrylic ink on the background once it was dry. I then applied a stencil from Sarah Trumpp with gold acrylic paint to add texture to the moon. Adding the curled form in the center was difficult. I ran into a lot of issues with pens that would not write on the surface, and so it took several tries to get her to a place I was okay with. I traced her image onto the moon using carbon paper, then tried to outline her with white which didn’t work out very well. So, I painted the image with black acrylic, and then tried once again to outline her with white. It still didn’t work out. I took a baby wipe and wiped most of what I had done away, and then added the same stencil image with gold acrylic as I had added to the moon. That left her looking a bit snakish. So, I took a gold gel pen, outlined her, and then started to outline some of the markings from the stencil, and that created an image that I was really happy with. Since this moon was a full pink, willow moon, I added willow leaves with a stabilo-all white pencil, so they would be less prominent than if I had used a gel pen. Overall, I really love how this spread turned out.
Book Recommendation: Day Six and Some Art
I took a few days off from my book recommendations and from writing my novel so that I could make some art that was swirling around in my head and needed to come out.
Now that I’ve fed the starving artist part of myself, I am back to writing my novel, and I am back with another book recommendation: The Sun and Her Flowers by rupi kaur. I had previously read her book of poems, Milk and Honey, and loved it, but the The Sun and Her Flowers reached me at my core. The poetry is as beautiful as it is brutal. It is about love, loss, and sexual assault. It is about the aftermath of sexual assault and how it affects every aspect of the self. It is about all the things we do because we believe we are not enough as we are. I related to so much of this book, and it worked like a salve for my soul.
Sarah Joyce Bryant 