Each year, I like to make sure I do one project that involves painting. Acrylics for the most part but any kind of painting. I liked the idea of Remembering things like I did for last year’s Remember This project. And I signed up for Life Book in 2015, too.
So Note to Self will be a year of painted pages, using mostly Life Book lessons and a moleskine watercolor journal.
At least that’s the plan.
For this first page, I used Flora Bowley’s lesson from Life Book 2014. Even though it has no writing, my note to self here to let myself be more free. Looser. This piece was done in many many layers and without any forethought. With some structure and grouping of colors but not much else.
It’s a reminder that I need to practice letting go. Like everything else, it’s a practice. This is also a reminder that what looks like chaos at first might end up as something magnificent. Part of the trick is trusting the process. Learning to see what’s there. To see inside the noise. And let the beauty emerge.
I am looking forward to another year of wonderful reminders and joyful art.
During the summer, I finally signed up for classes at SketchBook Skool after pondering them for way too long. The first class I signed up for was “seeing.” It had some of my very favorite sketchers like Danny (who is in all the classes, of course) and Brenda Swenson and Cathy Johnson and Andrea Joseph. Once all the people I loved were on the list, I just couldn’t not sign up.
And I am so glad I did.
The class was amazing. It inspired me to do the 75 Day Sketch Challenge and after that was over, I decided I wanted to keep sketching every single day. Even if it was something small. And since I really missed the color during the 75 days, I decided to sketch something small and color it with watercolors every morning.
And that was the birth of the Everyday Brave project.
I got a Watercolor Moleskine and played around for a few pages, and then I started what looks like the page you see above. Each week I plan to share a spread with some small sketches and some daily journaling. In the beginning, my journaling was about thoughts, daily musings, etc. But I’ve decided to use this project to keep track of my brave acts daily to remind myself to be braver and to be aware of when I am being brave. So even though the first few spreads will be random, the journaling starting in the new year will be about daily brave acts.
Here’s the left side of this page. It has a poppy bagel with tea and in the bottom middle is my ipad which I was using to listen to some audiobooks.
And the right side of my page which has the other half of the ipad on the bottom and a Starbucks latte on the right.
And there we are. Here’s to a year of little and big brave acts and a year full of sketches!
Today I know was a gift from the Soul Comfort class I took towards the end of 2013. And it ended up being one of my favorite projects from 2014. It never felt burdensome or cumbersome.
I really liked doing such a wide variety of pages. The art was fun. Learning to navigate the thin and non-waterproof pages of the book was fun. Playing with such a variety of mediums was also fun.
But the best part was the journaling. Getting to write out such interesting topics. Using the pages to collect my thoughts. I really loved it.
I seriously considered continuing the project for 2015 in some capacity. But I like to change things up. So I decided to bit farewell to this particular project. However, I am keeping my prompts and may end up using them in some other way.
In the meantime, I love love love this book that I ended up with. And I will go back and visit it regularly.
It was one of the few projects I didn’t abandon or modify in any way. I found a system early on in the year and it worked well enough for me to carry it throughout. Partly because I think this was a very flexible project. It was fun, diverse, introspective and rewarding.
I am very grateful to Melody for her wonderful ideas that never let me down.
Remember This was mostly to honor things that I knew I wanted to remember. Messages for myself. Lessons learned, etc. It was also a way to regularly do the assignments for the Life Book 2014 class I’d signed up for. As of now, I’ve done all but 4 of the classes. That’s 46 pieces of art from Life Book class. Not bad at all.
Of course, not all of them are my favorite. Many of them are not. But I still really liked experimenting with so many different styles, ideas and even mediums.
So much so that I decided to take Life Book 2015 as well. I am looking forward to another year of wide ranging art and experimentation.
Listen with Intent was all about setting intentions regularly. Remembering how I want to feel, thinking about what I want to be intentional about in the coming week.
I wanted to combine this reflective exercise with the goal to improve my lettering so each week I picked a different style to hand letter and I had intended to sketch each week, too, but about halfway through I realized that coming up with a matching idea on what to sketch got more and more difficult and it was impeding on my ability to get the project completed each week.
So I let it go. I decided to just focus on the lettering.
And I felt so very liberated. Looking back, I like each of these pages in their own way. I like the intentions. I like seeing them now. But…. I don’t think the project worked so well intention-setting-wise. I didn’t connect with the intentions the way I did when I did my first OLW or when I was doing the Life Organizer Book.
So, for next year I’d like to come up with a way to reconnect with my weekly intentions. I’d like to set them at the beginning of the week and I’d like to be aware of them all week long.
Maybe this means going back to doing Life Organizer book again. I’ve neglected that all year in 2014 and maybe this is a signal to go back.
Having said that, I feel like on the lettering front, this project was a big success.
I’ve tried a lot of lettering styles and I’ve enjoyed every one of them.
All in all, I am glad I did this project. I feel much more comfortable with using lettering and I love looking at the pages.
This was the first year I did my Savor Project digitally. I haven’t gotten it printed yet, so I am not sure how it will look in my hands and I am looking forward to getting it ready and ordering the book just because I know it will be fun to look through it. As with most of my projects, the first half of the year was considerably wordier, more deliberate and more successful.
But I did make it to the end of the year. I have a lot of spreads and I love what’s there. So many more stories got preserved thanks to this project. So many more pictures. So much more joy.
For 2015, I’ve decided to finally put this project to bed. Or at least take a year off and then see how I feel for 2016.
For now, I will focus on getting this one ready for printing and enjoy the guaranteed bliss I will get as I look over all of the pages in preparation.
This week’s inspiration comes from on of Tam’s lessons from Life Book 2014. I used acrylics on the flowers and border. It was quick to make and gives me a lot of joy!
prompt says: today i know that i really like to
Today I Know is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.
As I was designing my projects for 2014, I wanted to pick something different that didn’t involve drawing or coloring of any kind. Inspired by the class I was taking at the time, I decided to do a stitching project. I spent a lot of time perusing through pinterest, picking ideas I would like to try.
I started this project with a lot of enthusiasm. I really loved how cute they each turned out to be. I would keep my needle and embroidery thread in my bag and work on it as I waited at carpool.
But it didn’t take long before it felt like a lot of work and not nearly as much fun. Some of the designs took forever to finish and I felt more and more under the gun where it was more important to finish than to enjoy the process and take my time.
So much for the serenity I was hoping to get from this project.
Once I realized what was happening, I just didn’t feel the urge to continue anymore. And made the conscious decision to walk away from the obligation to finish out my year.
Looking at all the ones I did do, I still feel like it was very worthwhile and a lot of fun.
and very much something different for me. I cherish all of these.
This is one of the Week in the Life pages I made that will be going into my Savor album for 2014:
and finally this one is all about my art.
Savor Project is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.
For the life of me, I couldn’t get a good shot of this page. This month’s assignment was to write a letter to myself on my word. I painted my whole cardstock with lots and lots of color. Then I painted the middle white. Then I made some lines using the side of a palette knife and then journaled on it.
I am not a fan of the black lines but I do love all the color on the edges and in the lettering. You win some, you lose some.
Remember This is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.
And finally, for the last week, I decided to set an intention to embrace life. To embrace all the wonderful messages from the universe, from my community, my friends, my kids, my wonderful husband, my loving family. Embrace all the good in my life.
Here’s the pin where I got the lettering..
Listen with Intent is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.
This week’s inspiration comes from this pin. I used color pencils for the cup and watercolor on the background. It’s all crooked but I still like it.
prompt says: today i know that i might have been wrong about
Today I Know is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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