Tuesday, March 12, 2013

365 Week 11 -- You Still with Me?

It’s hard to believe, but we have been working on our 365 projects for ten weeks now! And here we are, ready to start week 11. Are you enjoying the process so far? If you’re like me, you’ve probably hit some highs and some lows. Just hang in there…I promise it will be worth it!

The last couple of weeks have been a really tough challenge for me. After the added stress of trying to do LOAD 213 at the same time as the 365, I thought it would get easy again with just one project demanding my attention each day. Unfortunately, while I was struggling to keep up with LOAD, a lot of other important projects were left undone, so I’ve spent the last two weeks playing catch up. Although I started off the 365 Challenge ahead of everyone else, I actually almost fell behind.

On top of the extra workload, I’ve had a bit of creative block on some of the prompts. One of the reason I do these kinds of challenges is because I have a tendency to stare blankly at my project when I’m not sure what to do. I waste a lot of time trying to get motivated or inspired. I’ve been trying to make myself just DO SOMETHING, even if I don’t like it. I have to say, some of my best work has come from starting with something I really didn’t like but I did it anyway and moved on from there. I just need to keep telling myself that it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to BE.

Here’s a look at my projects for this week.

Day 64 – Someone special

This prompt made me think of a Radiohead song. I had fun splicing the magazine photos together. The orb is the lid from a perfume bottle. The background is watercolor on gesso and ink with stencils.

Day 65 – Dry

I can’t help but think this one needs something, but I’m not sure what. I want the skin on the hand to be all crackly and dry, but I don’t know how to do it short of painting it with crackle paint, and that would ruin the picture. I also wanted the snake to fade into the hand more, but am not sure how to do it.

Day 66 – Cold

My cold picture didn’t turn out quite the way I’d planned. I set out to find some clear transparency film for overhead projectors that I could run through my laser printer. I have some for copiers and for ink jet, but nothing that will work for the laser printer. Lo and behold, every office supply in town is sold out! I couldn’t believe it! What an odd thing to run out of! Anyway, I wound up buying some supposedly “clear” labels, thinking it would work, but the “clear” turned out to be more like vellum. Luckily, it disappears on the page pretty well, but sadly, I got it on crooked and it wouldn’t move.

Day 67 – Practice

This is another one that I feel needs a little something more. There’s a big empty space to the right of the dancers, but I don’t know what to put there. When I look at the art journal pages of others, I see lots of “stuff” on their pages and mine seem very stark by comparison. This is true of many of my scrapbook pages, too. Even when I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time and put a lot of detail in to a page, it still feels ‘bare”. I just haven’t mastered the art of filling it up. I don’t even know where to start!

Day 68 – Early bird or worm?

I learned a new technique on the day I did this page, so I thought I’d try it out. I was inspired by the video that I saw here. Yes, I know, this page has absolutely nothing to do with the style and techniques done in the video except that it reminded me I wanted to play with my inks and sponges and I did use her technique of masking off areas with Glossy Accents. The grass was made with an assortment of stamps and everything else was hand drawn and colored.

Day 69 – Never again…

This is one of the pages that stumped me. The first day I worked on it, all I got done was the background and the woman. I just couldn’t come up with a source for my “never again”. Eventually, I did think of something, but then it took until the next day before I could get the wording down.

Day 70 – I wonder….

This was one of the most fun pages I’ve put together. I really enjoyed painting the background and adding the stamps. If I had been working on a bigger area, I would have used a few more stamps and come up with a longer list of things I wonder. I’m still thinking of things that I wish I had the space to add!