Inspiration Wednesday Journal: Jan-March

Thought I'd share my Inspiration Wednesday Journal with ya'll.
Inspiration Wednesday is a "class" I'm taking on-line with Donna Downey. I've done it the last two years so if you want to go back through old blog posts you can see pages from my past journals. You can still sign up for this. Just go to Donna's site and buy it. It's really fun. I am working in one of her handmade journals that she sells in her shop. This journal tends to be mainly acrylic and collage work.

But anywho, here's the journal. I'll be making this pretty brief as I am still 2 weeks behind in this and I don't remember much about the specifics of the pages. But hey...pretty pictures? right?

First Page:  Does this look familiar? Yup. For the first page I decided to go with texture paste through a stencil. I admit I fell in love with this stencil and now I'm using it everywhere. I was going for the vintage seed packet look. Didn't really pull it off here but it was good practice.

Courage in a Cup:   Trying to be more "painterly", as Donna put it. I rather surprised myself and found the "painting" to be rather enjoyable. I was almost certain the finished page would look like a toddler fingerpainting but I'm very pleased with it. I chose my word for the journal: Courage. 

3 Lemons:  A theme was beginning to develop. I admit I'm not a fan of still life. I understand using it for practice but I've never liked it. This was where I began to fall behind as I dreaded doing the page. But after watching the video about 50 times, I sucked it up and gave it a shot. Amazing! I think this spread turned out fabulous. Way better that I had given myself credit for. Do I now like still life? Not a chance but this was a wonderful confidence booster. COURAGE was definately the word to pick!

Mixed Media Lemons:  I could also call this page, "Donna proves a point", but I won't get into that. So far my pages are looking a bit similiar but techniques were different. So back to the lemons. I could have changed up the fruits a bit but I honestly felt good about the lemons. I was focusing my attention on shading. I can do shading but sometimes I don't think I get the real 3-D kind of look I'd like. So I practiced more.

Both lemons were done a bit differently. The one on the top (or left page) has a base of washi tape. I created the lemon out of colored tape then added touches of acrylic over it. It's hard to see in the photo but the shadow of the lemon shows the washi tape (it has gears on it) beneath the paint. The lemon on the bottom (or the right page) was torn from brown paper and glued down. I used gelato over the top of it to color it.


At this point in my journal, things were starting to look the same. I was learning things but the pages had no excitement for me. Lemons, baby, were not my thing. Easy to practice with but seriously, these pages don't hold anything of me in them. But had I not done those pages, and learned those things, I don't think the next pages would have been so good.

Whales:   I'll just say that I love these pages. I honestly did not think this would work. But from pushing through the other pages and knowing it's all practice, I got this magnificence. Maybe you don't see it, but I do. It was scary in a couple different ways. First, the basis was image transfer and I have limited success with it and limited experience with it. Second, it was a minimal page. So every small thing I did would be obvious, so not much room for error. Donna said, "image transfer is always a crapshoot" and mine certainly was. The background text transfered rather well for what I wanted. But the whales...ugh...I couldn't get a nice solid or dark transfer. I think I may have been using too much medium. I set that aside. So the images weren't perfect. They didn't have to be. Onto the color.

Ah...color. That's my jam, my comfort zone. I needed a watercolory look more transparent than not. All I knew was that I couldn't use all blue. Honestly, I had enough blue backgrounds and I needed to add another color. I pulled three fluid acrylics: Cobalt Turquoise, Payne's Gray, and Viridian Green. In other words; watery teal, midnight blue, and Godzilla green. I painted the background first and used lots of water to pull the paint out from around the whales. Then, I added layers of paint to get the deeper shades where I needed them.
Because my image transfer had left behind some paper, I got splotches of color in the whales where the paper soaked up the paint. I was too lazy to try and "fix" the image transfer and peel off the little stray bits of paper. I liked it. Who knew my laziness would pay off? For all the apparent simplicity of this spread, I'm in love with it. It's something you don't really see up close but after you walk away for a bit and come back...yeah, baby.
I may be going to canvas with this one.


I was hesitant to share this journal as it didn't speak to me...until today.
Perhaps my courage will continue to speak in these pages.
Have a great week.
-Wy