reflections on the february daily art journal

click on this mosaic to see the whole set on flickr.

here it is, my mosaic of all of the pages of my february art journal calendar. this is such an interesting process. here in february, i've been less religious about sitting down and doing a page every single day, so there are many which stretch across two pages, because i didn't do them until the second day, thereby giving myself more space. i'm finding that works a bit better for me.

here are the close-ups of the second half of february. the first half is here.

february 15 - doodlings on a heavily embroidered dress seen in jean-paul gaultier's haute couture show

february 16 - sketch of the inkle loom that we bought  for sabin to weave ribbon on at our beloved randbøldal museum.

 february 17 18 - experimenting with monoprinting

i scribbled a thick layer of pastels on an ordinary sheet of paper and then laid it against the page and drew on it. it was fun!

 february 19 - cutting up one of those free postcards

february 20 - more monoprinting, this time a spillover from the soujournal project

february 21 - 22 a doodle a bit inspired by these, seen on flickr,

but with my own motifs. 

this was the first time when i sat down with the calendar and didn't know what to do.

and i think that shows.

as you can see, the past few days, after elizabeth (aka my zen master) sent me a link to a wonderful artist named shannon rankin, i played with some maps and really found my groove. expect more map stuff in the near future. it was well-timed, because husband had just cut up a map to aid him in our property search and so i had some extra bits of map at my disposal. sometimes cutting into such things is hard for me, but since it had already been cut, i had no inhibitions.

february 23 - 24 thinking about redrawing maps

these are places that have been important to me.

but i shuffled them at will. that was liberating.

february 25 - 26  driving around, looking at 8 farm places had me spending a lot of time with maps over two days. i found myself wondering which road would lead to our new home.

february 27-28 - fragments of a topography

maps in general interest me - topographies and mapping and drawing and tracing the topography of a life. that's what we're going to do in moving, we're going to redraw our internal maps. i got a bit of a start on it here at the end of february.

i still don't have a clear idea where this project is taking me. but combined with the soujournal project, i'm doing a lot of art journaling this year and that seems like a good thing. in fact, it seems so good, i've been pondering ways of sharing it.

so i'm putting together an online art journaling course. at first it was only in my mind, but now it's spilled onto the page a bit and i've even begun to make up packets of pretty papers for it. i'm still at the planning stage, but i'd love to know if you'd be interested in taking an online art journaling course and coming to explore this medium with me? please email me with any ideas you have about this - what you'd like to do in such a course, how you'd like to interact with the other participants, thoughts on materials and the like.

and don't forget to check out my fabulous new orange coat below. it was totally worth breaking the year of not buying things. :-)