“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.” –James Stephens
I have signed up for a years worth of online art classes through the website #Everything-Art.com. It is called Wanderlust 2021. Every week there will be a class. Twenty-seven teachers will be instructing a variety of techniques and methods using a variety of medium such as watercolor, encaustics, collage, art journaling, using stencils to name a few. I am excited for this new experience and a little pensive too. To get my feet wet, I am participating right now in a 14 day free course taught by Kasia Avery, whom is the developer of Wanderlust. In this course, she gives us a daily prompt and encouraging words to launch us into decorating our art journal. In this blog post, I will be sharing a few of my pages.
I’ve already learned on the second day that I used too small of a format. I was afraid to make it too big fearful I wouldn’t be able to fill the pages. Instead, I found that the 3.5″ x 5″ was limiting in finding collage items that would fit on the page. Still, I am having fun expressing myself using a variety of colors and art media. Here we go.
Day 1 – Wasting Time. Allow yourself the time to explore your artwork. Choose a color pallet and use those colors to express some thoughts and feelings. I used the Title page above to do this assignment. Since this is supposed to be an advent calendar, I used a Christmasy theme. The idea is to have fun exploring marks on paper and not worry about the end product.
Day 2 – Put yourself in the way of beauty. Think about beauty using all the senses. Light a scented candle, put on some music and make entries in your journal. I created a two page spread using some gel print pages I had on hand that matched my color scheme. I chose some magazine clippings and a photo I had of my grandchildren to relay my message of beauty.
Day 3 – Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. Kasia’s idea for this lesson was to fight against excuses and thinking you need all the materials, a set place, and inspiration to create. You can create while traveling, in the office, in front of the television. Use a pen or pencil, sketch on a napkin, or a magazine page, or on computer paper. If you have an idea or and inkling of one, write or color it, or draw it. Just get it down. It can be expounded on later or used as a starting point or maybe even be pasted into your journal as a final entry. I scoured through my gel print pages and found this one that looked to me like a Christmas tree. I found a little picture of sweets in a Harry and David catalog. Added a scrap of red painted paper to add pizazz. From my decorative paper stock I found a green starry background paper and used it to signify Christmas. The little saying which I found among my collage papers suited the theme Kasia speaks about in her videos. For more pizazz I used crayon, pen, and gold ink to decorate my tree and add some gifts to the mix. I’m rather happy how this came out for about a half hour of work.
Day 4 – Theme was Art is Freedom.
To me this meant you can use your art to explore and express your thoughts and feelings. With the elections, Black Lives Matter issues, and the effect the pandemic has had in the world these days, I’ve been thinking about the theme of Tolerance quite a bit. Some months ago I discovered a publication called “Teaching Tolerance” published by the Southern Poverty Law Review. The publication is aimed at educators and is focused on educating children and, in my opinion, more importantly educating the adults ie. instructors, parents, principals, the public about discrimination and methods for tolerating differences between cultures, races, gender preferences and other communities effected by discrimination. In this assignment, I have focused on this theme. Using art to teach tolerance. I tried to stay within my original color scheme. Here is the collage.
I thought it was weird that when I cut out the words ‘adults need to get on board’ to make it fit on my page it turned out looking like a boat. It was also weird that the colors in the magazine images followed with my journal’s color scheme.
Well, that about does it for today’s posting. As I continue along this journey, I will aim to share some of my more successful attempts at making art. I’m going to try adding more painting and drawing. Hope you come along.
