365 Week 5

Whenever I start a challenge like the 365, my emotions run the gamut.  In the beginning, I’m really excited about it, and I look forward to each day’s challenge.  By the middle, I’m starting to wonder what I got myself into, and then it turns into, “When is this going to be over?”  Amazingly, once I get to the end, I’m look back and think to myself, “Did I really do all that?”

Since our 365 is a long challenge, I know that many of you may be already in the “What did I get myself into” phase.  Hang in there!  We may still have a long way to go, but I do promise that there will be more times when you are excited about each day’s challenge.  It’s a lot like a roller coaster, and if you just keep working the prompts, you will get to the end and say, “Did I really do all that?”

So are you ready to dig into another week?  Here we go:

• I would like to return to
• Someone once told me
• What gives me hope?
• I would like to be remembered for…
• Family
• If I were an animal, I would be…
• Use a newspaper article or current event on tv as your prompt

Here are some of the pieces I did this week:

Day 22:  Worry

I tried my hand at drawing again.  I still have mixed feelings about the results.  I found a picture in a magazine of a woman posed like this and drew from that.  Although I think I fairly accurately sketched a person with a worried expression, my woman doesn’t even come close to looking like the woman in the photograph.  I wish I could figure out why.

Day 23:  I recommend

I hate to say it, but this one is sort of unfinished.  The prompt made me think of the healing powers of faith, so I started out by drawing symbols of faith and I was planning to do some kind of zentangle-ish thing with that, but it just never quite evolved.  Eventually, I added some other objects and decided to fill the page with other symbols, but I ran out of things I thought I could draw.  I haven’t decided where to go with it from here.  That’s okay…art journaling isn’t necessarily about finishing a page every day, and it’s actually pretty common for artists to revisit past pages to add a little here or change something there.  An art journal is a work in progress.

Day 24:  Negative anagram of your name (faults and vices)

I went with a more scrapbook feel for this prompt simply because I couldn’t find an example of what I was wanting to do with it.  Several days earlier, I had been surfing the web and found some really cool art journal examples.  On one, the artist had done some cool 3–D zentangle-type art with the words and then filled up the page with other stuff.  I wanted to see if I could do that.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the sample again, and I can’t remember enough to try and replicate it, so I went with something I do know…scrapbooking.  The words were a little hard.  I’m not happy with the Y, but it was the best I could do.

Day 25:  Define grown up

I think this page turned out better than I hoped.  I had the dress stamp and the “bug hat”, which I just bought, so I was excited to try drawing the rest of the girl around those stamps.  I started out by stamping the dress in Staz-on ink and then using a Sharpie to draw the rest of her body.  I masked the area with the quote and then stamped the other images on the page.  I used water colors for the background, and my Stampin’ Up! markers for most of the rest.  I did color the girl’s hair and clothing with Copics.  Unfortunately, I forgot that Copics and Sharpies don’t mix and it bled a little where I colored her shoe.

Day 26:  Rules are meant to be broken

I had a lot of fun doing this page.  The background was a scrap that I had pre-sprayed with Tattered Angels a few days earlier when I was testing a few things out.  The rulers were scraps of patterned paper I had used on some scrapbook pages a while back and the little quote was a piece I had in my smash book box.  I found the picture of the sheriff on the internet and printed him out.

Day 27:  I will

There’s been a lot of clues about my power word lately, both on my art pages and here on this blog.  This page is made of sales flyers and magazine cut-outs as well as some die-cut letters made from a page I tore out of the book.  The background images were all stamped using Memento ink and an assortment of tiny stamps.

Day 28:  By the numbers

This page didn’t turn out anything like I expected.  I started out trying to clear emboss on the page so that certain areas (the numbers) would resist the ink rubbing.  Unfortunately, my embossing pen wasn’t really clear – it left a bluish tint behind, and when I heated the embossing powder on it, it just turned dark and made the paper look oily.  So I wound up coloring over the numbers with white pen.

That’s it for this week.  I hope you’re hanging in there!  Please feel free to share your work with us on our Flickr gallery.