AN ENLIGHTENING AND DISTURBING VISION

While I was resting this afternoon, as well as being severely depressed, I had a vision of what I needed to do on my next journal page.  To me it spoke a lot of the conflicts that are tearing me apart.  It is symbolic of the struggles I am going through emotionally, physically and spiritually in my life and how it feels to be torn apart. Inside this broken heart is the little girl who was the first one to encounter the abuses of this life.  I know that I am not the only person to have had a dysfunctional childhood, bad teens and abusive twenties (in fact, I know many personally who have had it much much worse) and I am fortunate to have found the love and grace of God to help me through the years ahead and to live with and deal with the memories of the past.  But...this does not negate the painful feelings that exist and continue through the behaviors created in defense to try to prevent these things from reoccurring.  They are old and inappropriate but hard to eliminate.  They often cause me to seek approval in all the wrong places and by doing all the wrong things.  This is always followed up with guilt, depression and unforgiveness both to myself and often by others in my life.  The one good thing that has happened for me recently is that I have finally started to realize the enormity of the love and forgiveness of God.  No matter what stupid mistake I make He is forgiving in ways that humans simply are not.  That is helping me to forgive myself although not as quickly or totally as I need to in order to escape the pain of the depression and anxiety.  I realized that I need to forgive myself because these past, present and future sins and mistakes were all taken and nailed to the cross of our Savior Jesus Christ.  If He did this for me what right do I have to hang on to the unforgiveness of others or for not forgiving myself.

I started my page with the usual layer of gesso to prep and strengthen the paper and then my latest favorite Dry Dex Spackle and my absolutely favorite Crafters Workshop template with swirls. I love the texture of the spackle and how it goes on pink then turns white when it is dry.  Helps with my impatience as I actually can tell when it is truly ready to add color and other elements.  I think I like the swirls because they represent my swimming thoughts and behaviors, they run in all different directions and in circular motion which is often how my emotions feel when I am working on these issues.

My next step was to add background color.  I started with a full coat of black gesso smeared on with a credit card.  Next I dripped on various colors of acrylic paints which I smeared into the wet black gesso with my fingers - yes...very messy but I am very tactile and love to get into the feel of everything I do.  On top of the drip and smear I added some spray inks.

Obviously the next step will be to lighten things up a bit so everything doesn't get lost in the blackness.  In order to do this I add some white gesso scraped on with the credit card while the mists were still wet. The paint layers were getting a bit thick and the texture was getting lost so I rolled over it all with paper towels.

I added some gold Perfect pearls for highlighting as well as a red doily heart torn in two, a little girl with a face of me as a child and the chains on each side of the heart showing the pulling apart.  I finished it off with splats of red to represent blood and blue to represent tears.  I then smeared those with the credit card.  I am not happy with the page but I don't know what else I would want to add other than possibly some words.

Yes...the words have it.  I tried a White Sharpie Paint Pen but did not do well with it and ended up with gesso and a paint brush.  It is messy and rough but as the feelings and the whole page is so raw it probably suits it much better than neat lettering would have.

Not one of my favorite pages but it is full of raw emotion and that is one way of getting the pain out.

HAPPY NATIONAL SCRAPBOOKING DAY!

While I wait for the gesso to dry for the art journal page I am hoping to create tonite I decided I would share  with you my creations from yesterday's National Scrapbooking Day.  It's funny as neither of the things I did were scrapbooking pages.  This year I joined the Flying Unicorn for their challenges and celebration.  This was the first time I had ever played there and I was amazed to win 2 door prizes and the art journaling challenge.  I was only able to complete two challenges.  The first was called 'It's Not a Square Thing' and was a card challenge to create a card in any other shape but square.  I chose round.  Here is my card:

The other challenge I chose was the Art Journaling challenge.  For this challenge you needed to create a journal page about spring using the following techniques and/or supplies:

- Paint and/or Gesso

- Masking with color (mist, ink, paint, etc)

- Masking with media (gesso, molding paste, glass beads gel, etc)

- At least one layer of paper other than your background

- At least 2 plants

I started as I do on all my journal pages, with a layer of gesso.  I used masks and templates with mist, ink, paint and my latest favorite - Derwent Inktense Blocks.  For media I used some molding paste and then my favorite - spackle and a butterfly template.  My other layer of paper was the swirl and my title. My two plants were the flowers done with the template and leaves from another template and done with dimensional paint.

Here is my page:

Hope that you have enjoyed a peek at my creations from yesterday.  My gesso should be dry now and I am taking off to work on it.

Have a wonderful evening!