Last Week's BOD Spread

For the first time in over a month I finished a Book of Days spread and it felt soooo good!
It FEELS good to get back to art. I have been arting a lot in the past week. About half way through the week I was starting to get discouraged, specifically in my Lifebook page. I had hoped to sit down and art it out! One day, done! Alas, that's not my life, there are little interruptions, BIG interruptions, bad days, busy-ness, and plain old laziness. But, I belong to a group on Facebook for the Book of Days and it has evolved into the most wonderful of support systems! When I am feeling down it's what I surf around on for a while and I always come away with a smile for I have found art posted by my sisters to inspire me or I have witnessed someone post with honesty about how they may need positive energy/prayers sent their way and I have seen a group of women swoop in to the rescue to offer prayers, love, support, and kind words. It leaves one with the most wonderful feeling that there are indeed still wonderful people in this world and this is just a sampling of such good hearts.
Effy Wild's blog post really says it all. <3

And so, onto the art...

I have been loosely following along with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's 30 Days in your Art Journal.
Well, I bought and paid for the class and finished week one with no problems in March.
But then, in week two she does this awesome spread where she uses tags to journal on and I kept putting it off, meaning to buy the tags but never getting around to it. Weeks slipped on by and I started looking around my house for things to use instead, don't get me wrong, Julie offered up several awesome substitutions but I REALLY just wanted tags.
Finally the 1st of April rolled around and I knew I had been art-less for too long.


This is the background as it sat for over a month, untouched.

Painted with wet craft acrylics, I did the base in apple green over a non-gessoed page, then smeared a corner with another craft acrylic in a shimmery red which just turned out to be pink.
Stamped the circles with a toilet tissue roll and black acrylic paint.
Then I took my most favorite shimmery purple craft acrylic and colored some circles in and then painted some clear glitter acrylic paint over them because there just wasn't enough sparkle.
Yum, loving glitter.


Gratuitous glitter close-ups!

So after a month of ignoring my BOD I decided it was time to move forward and put this pretty background to use! I had considered using those subscribe postcards that fall out of magazines
(I started collecting them from all over), but they were a little too busy for my liking,
I considered card stock cut in the shape of tags or just in funky shapes but it seemed to plain.
And one day I was cleaning and re-organizing all my supplies and I found a stack of
multi-colored post its and that was IT!
They were bright and colorful but still a little plain for my liking, so I took a total of 12 of them and painted them all different with my watercolor crayons and then sprayed them with a spray I made from my shimmery red acrylic paint and water
(Again, it turned out pink, not red! Oh well!)

Shiiiiiiimmmmmmmmerrrrrrrrr!


Stacked in sets of 2 for journaling in a possible layout plan.

So, then the work started! This was one of the easiest journal layouts to keep up with!
I just tucked the sets of 2 glued together post its in my book and everyday I would pull a set out and journal on it and glue it down!
The layout was pretty much complete, I just had to journal!


Half finished!

My layout ran from Wednesday, April 11th to Monday, the 16th.
Somewhere in there I had decided that I needed something more and I cut some post its into three equal pieces and watercolored them and glued them in thinking I would write important words or something on them or something that would pertain to each day but I was undecided so they stayed blank for a day or two.
On Sunday, I realized that I should just incorporate my daily prayer journal into my BOD because I have been a bad panda and haven't been keeping up with it at all!
I belong to a 30 Day Prayer Journal group on Motley Soul, and Mika is usually so good about posting a scripture daily and thus far I glued and clipped all the ones from March into a composition notebook, but I hadn't done anything in April.
So, why not put those in my BOD!?!
I mean, I joined the group wanting to make scripture and prayer a bigger part of my life!
Well that's what I did!


The finished page!

On Monday I got Happy Mail from on of my BOD Sisters and in the envelope was my very first row house, some awesome napkins and papers, paper doilies and PUNCHINELLA!
I have been wanting some but found none in my small, small town, and I never get to go to the city anymore, so I was SO thankful that my sister H. Crump sent some to me!
To commemorate my first bit of punchinella, I used it!
As a stencil first with orange paint and I also cut off a small bit and glued it onto the corner!


Had to take a picture with the light hitting the shimmer paint.


And finally, showing most of the glued in scriptures!

And that's it for Tuesday's blog!
I finished two other projects yesterday/last night as well but I am going to blog about them one at a time and will schedule them to post the next two days so check back I am trying to make blogging a more regular thing!