Art Journal Every Day: March Ends & April Begins

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived 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, use the hashtag #artjournaleveryday so that we can all take a peek.  Even if you're not on social media, you can see everything (from twitter, pinterest, instagram, and facebook) that uses that hashtag here. 

Today I'm sharing pages from the end of March and the beginning of April.  I was thinking about why I hated so many of the pages in my previous art journal, but liked these ones?  Was I having a style crisis?  Is it the journal itself?  And then I realized: it's the timing.  My Father died in December.  It makes sense that my pages from that time period felt dark and heavy and icky.  After all, art is an expression of how you feel, isn't it?  I can see the literal lightening of my mood in these pages from the end of March and beginning of April.

Lots of hand carved stamps on this page!

One of the exercises I always teach in my lettering classes is about taking a letter (like an "a") and imagining all the different ways it could look.  Some days my imagination is better than other days!

There's a hole in this page.

Because I create my journals from the leftover "junque" in my studio, I end up with lots of cool cut outs in my art journal.

I really love these loose and kind of abstract florals.

April is beginning to bloom.  Literally.

And here's that hole from the other side:

And a close-up of that face with attitude!

I had painted this page gray (probably part of my mood at the time) but ended up sparking it up with brighter colors and I'm glad that I did.  In art, as in life, you need the darks to see the lights!

Thanks for stopping by!