I've spent a lot of time just homeschooling my daughter and doing general housework. Just spending time being a mom. I must say it is paying off because she is becoming a splendid artist. However, she hates to write. So I have spent some time recently making an art journal. She is starting to copy me a little and I think she's hating writing a little bit less than before. ;)
I got the idea from The Kathryn Wheel after a day (or two) of blog hopping. I think she's come up with some fantastic journaling ideas and I'm taking it into the realm of homeschooling. Eventually my daughter will see that writing just a little bit every day turns into a lot of writing that is interesting to read later on.
I hope so anyway.
That said, I took a long time to decide if I was even going to blog about my journal. I had a lot of attention for awhile when I was doing the digital art thing and I wasn't sure if I wanted the attention again. I'm still not sure but I do like to show off my art work.
I also like to do things for very low cost, even for free. I hate spending money. So I have an additional challenge for myself with this journal. My goal is to use up as much of my art supplies as possible without buying anything new. I have left myself the single exception of the base color of acrylic paint that I have chosen and that is yellow. I have many different base colors for many of my pages but the one I do not want to run out of is yellow. And two of my local craft stores have basic acrylic paints (store brands) for 50 cents a bottle. So far this year I've spent $2. Not bad.
The other thing is that the journal will not be a lot of mixed media. It is mostly painted. I did do the first three months using paper squares for the calender days and I decided I didn't want to add anymore thickness to the book. I'm thinking that limiting myself to just paint might make me stretch my abilities.
I've also been cutting my own stencils from some copier transparencies that I got from my mother in law when her work was getting rid of several boxes. I could conceivably end up making about 900 stencils. I don't think I really need that many stencils but then you never know what sort of weird patterns I might like to have on my pages.
And the book I got for free! My library gives away books on a free shelf just outside their main lobby. This book has a nice cloth cover, it's as large as the big journals from the art supply store and it has really heavy duty paper. The really nice thing is that the paper doesn't curl up when it is painted. I decided that I want this journal to be for just one year so each month has about 8 pages to it. The main calender type page and then other pages for random art and more personal journaling. That way I can keep the truly personal stuff offline and I can still share some of the artistic stuff here.
So today I want to post the first page I did where I celebrated the ending of the year 2012.
I'll post some more in the next couple of weeks to get caught up. I hope. It's interesting how busy life gets when you homeschool.
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