Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all my blogging friends! May all of your wishes and hopes come true!
I started out the new year by scrapping. Next week hubby will be home, so I won't have much time to scrap then as we're planning to take out the kids and do some fun stuff. So, to make up for next week in advance, I've pretty much done nothing in the house these last few days but scrap LOL.

I'll start off by showing you my DT submission for this month's challenge over at Artastic. The inspiration came from Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party".

I didn't follow the painting this month, just the criteria, which are:

1. Scrap a celebration
2. Three or more people in the layout
3. Food somewhere in the layout

I decided to scrap a celebration of meeting/making new friends. Last summer, I got to meet my sweet online friends Jenneke and Jeanet, and we had a wonderful day shopping for scrap supplies, talking, laughing and just getting to know each other. I so enjoyed meeting them, and I wanted my page to reflect that happy feeling. So, I chose happy colours and a happy design.

My "happy" design turned out a bit childish ... Christina, my youngest daughter, who normally adores just about everything I make, asked if it was finished already LOL. She thought it to be "empty" and not exactly "true to my own style". She might be right, but I really do love it more and more each time I look at it. This page takes me back to a wonderful day and makes me smile ... and isn't that really all it's supposed to do?

It looks like a simple page, but it actually took quite some work. I outlined every little thing with my black marker, even my hambly embellies (flowers and butterflies), and in fact they do look rather pretty outlined like that. The white scallops took 3 coats of paint (!!!) before having the desired effect. The title was hand drawn and coloured in with regular markers. Still, all worth the effort to me.

Onto something else ... one of my favorite bloggers of all time is Julie Fei-Fan Balzer. Not only do I love her work, her blog is interesting to read as well and she often shares step by step instructions, which is always fun to watch. Last month, she wrote a few posts about art journaling in which she called out for people to join her in her resolution to "art journal every day". Now I thought long and hard about joining, because I've made resolutions to art journal before, and I always fail to keep it up. Still, I had decided for myself to start art journaling again in 2011, but what really persuaded me was her concept. You don't have to finish a page a day, it really doesn't matter how many pages a year you finish ... all Julie's suggesting is working in your art journal for 10 minutes a day. Start on a page, and add a little something every day... I like that idea! Over 200 people have signed up already, if you want to join as well, you can do so here.

Yesterday I started and completed my cover page. I'm using one of my children's old story books, just because I liked the size of it and it saved me a trip to the shops and kept my money in my pocket :-). The pages are kinda shiny, which worried me a bit, but once I gessoed over them, it worked like a charm! For my cover page, I was inspired by Marit and Lena. Both women are masters in collaging, something which doesn't come easy for me. I've tried before but all my attempts ended up in the bin. Yesterday, I tried again ... here's the result:

I so love the result! I decided not to try too hard, which seemed to have done the trick to finally be able to complete a page like this! I started out modestly ... the head and body don't belong to each other, but they easily could, which they are not supposed to I think. The collage isn't all that obvious, which is why I drew her legs, because even the legs I chose matched the rest of the girl perfectly LOL. I'm sure I'll get better at it if I keep trying, and I will, because it's just so much fun! Obviously this took me more than 10 minutes, but that's okay too. I'll just work in this journal whenever I feel like it, whenever I have some spare time. I'll be fun trying out new techniques in this book without being afraid if it will "match" the rest of the page. This book will be just for me and me only. Can you tell I'm excited about this??

I chose Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote to start off the new year: "To be yourself in world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment". I guess you could say this is my new year's resolution: to try and stay true to myself, but also trying to be the best version of myself. This could possibly include quitting smoking, losing weight, exercising more and so on, but not necessarily. I've tried all of those things before, without result, and I don't feel like setting myself up for failure this year round. I just want to do the best I can, to be the best version possible of who I am right now. That shouldn't be too hard now should it LOL.

I actually started working in this book last year, but I only made one spread about the first week of september (told you I never keep up with these things!!!). But, keeping in the spirit of this book being just for me and for trying out new things, I also did a page prompted by a challenge over at GPP Street Team. The prompt was to make a page just by using a credit card or something to smear out paint, no brushes allowed. I was so surprised by the result, it actually turned out pretty nice:

Haha, I don't know if you can tell, but I tried to make flowers in the foreground and a sky and two trees in the background. And I didn't decide on that untill after quite a few layers ... So this is just layer over layer over layer smeared out paint with an old credit card. Pretty amazing that you can actually make something recognizable that way, isn't it? I'm just leaving it like this in my journal, I don't feel the need to journal over it. I thought about it, which is why I hadn't posted it yet, but decided against it.

With the access paint of this page, I smeared paint all over the next page, just randomly, and yesterday I added a yellow surface. So now the page looks a little like this:

Not impressed??? Well neither am I at this point. But this is the background of my new art journal page. I have absolutely no idea what I'll be doing with it next, but I'm excited to find out LOL!

Have a wonderful first week of the New Year my friends!

xxx Peggy