Balcony Journal

 

It's a very sunny morning and our hotel room balcony gets a whole lot of it, so I'm out here sketching and drawing and glue-sticking in the ephemera I've grabbed on the first day of our short trip to San Diego for my DH to attend a conference. 

I brought my Art Bin travel case, which has a lot of color packed into it, colored pencils and pens, watercolor crayons and pencils, and lots of other mark-making implements. And of course my favorite green vacuum cup for tea on the table next to me.

The small journal I've been using for the ephemera journal has fairly lightweight paper so I'd just been sticking to colored pencils and pens so far. But today I experimented to see if it could take a little bit of water along with the watercolor pencils. It did pretty well, some slight wrinkling after drying in the sun, but the paper did not come apart under my brush and it also didn't soak through to the other side either. That means there'll be more of this in the future for this journal. I just have to be careful to not overdo it, especially around glue-sticked elements. Sometimes the water will wick it's way through the paper and undo what I've already glued down, especially if the glue hasn't dried all the way yet.

Scrambled Leftovers

Here's the one V-Day card I managed to make for my DH. I like how it turned out, and I also will note that he doesn't mind pink. I held back on adding any glitter, but just barely. And mostly because I didn't want to have to deep clean my workspace afterwards. (craft herpes!)

The clean up of all the cut-outs ended up in my visual ephemera journal as Valentine Leftovers.
 

52 Weeks of Being 52

This is my 52nd year, and I've started a visual journal titled:

52 Weeks of Being 52

It just seemed so perfect, 52 weeks in a year, why not?

 This is my "title" page, I'm not sure it's completely done or not. I'm using a Strathmore Visual Journal that has nice thick watercolor paper that is suited for mixed-media work. And my media was indeed mixed, as I used Prismacolor colored pencils, Derwent Inktense blocks, Sakura Pigma Micron Pen, rubber stamping with Distress Ink pads and a few stick-on foil stars.

I won't promise that  I'll share all of the pages here or not, or even manage to share them as I create them (hopefully) weekly. But I'll try. And since I'm 52, I get to get away with things like that!

Reasons For Keeping A Visual Journal

Why keeping a visual journal is so important, with thanks to Ricë Freeman-Zachery: