Art Journal Every Day: Judy Wise & Me

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, all the posts can be found here.  Please read this post first.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

I can't quite remember when I discovered Judy Wise's blog but I immediately fell in love with her overstuffed journal pages.  

So beautiful!

She is the one who inspired me to start journaling daily -- a discipline I began about three years ago with some breaks here and there.  Her blog is great, but she rarely talks about how she creates and there are never tutorials.  So I kept watching her travel schedule, hoping that she'd end up teaching somewhere on the East Coast.  No such luck.  So I continued to plod along in my journal, finding my own way.  But then she announced that she was going to be teaching an online journaling class!  I signed up immediately and without a second's hesitation over the $100 price tag.

Today is the last day of class.  I have enjoyed it thoroughly.  There are some things that I wish were different.  But I suppose that's always true.  Mostly I'm eternally grateful to Judy for inspiring me to get back into the habit of daily journaling.  I had fallen off the wagon a bit in recent months.

It turns out that Judy and I use many of the same techniques!  At first I was surprised.  I think of her as a very high and mighty artist and was shocked to discover that we play in the same way.  But then I thought about it.  Why wouldn't that be so?  I'm drawn to her work, so we're clearly drawn to the same things.  Plus there are only so many ways to skin a cat, so to speak.  But she has a unique spin on many classic techniques and I've definitely been inspired.  And she has piqued my interest in plaster -- something I know absolutely nothing about.  As a result I just bought her book Plaster Studio...

...and I'm looking forward to reading it and exploring a whole new medium.

I thought I would share some of the pages I've made while in class.

In the beginning I stuck very closely to what Judy was teaching.  She told us to collage images and words and draw a face and so I did.

This next page is a complete and total lift of Judy's page, down to the weird little arms and hands reaching for something.

But as class went on I started straying from her style and started trying to work the lessons into my own style, with mixed results.

And even though I didn't like the pages I kept at it -- trying to find a way to mix her Judy-style with my Julie-style.

I found my mind populated with fresh new ideas that I wanted to try out...

...like this little flappy page inserted into my book.  And I have a bunch of new pages prepped and waiting for their daily entries:

Inspiration is a wonderful priceless thing. And during the course of this class I found myself reminded that taking a class is not just about a transfer of information. Taking a class is about receiving a spark from the teacher that lights your own wick.

Here's the linky list for this week:

Thanks for stopping by!  Wishing you a happy holiday weekend!

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P.S. Ashley Calder (author of Scraptastic) was so delighted to see it as the first Balzer Designs Book Club selection that she is giving away a copy of the book on her blog!  Woo Hoo!  Visit her blog and leave a comment to win a copy of Scraptastic!