Art Journaling Workshop

On Saturday I attended an art journaling workshop at Tranquil Space yoga studio in DC. Carolyn was in town and Valerie was going, so it was the perfect time to give it a try! I was a little bit apprehensive about cutting my magazines up and making a mess (thank you, neat freak tendencies!) but that soon went out the window. Kimberly encouraged us to start in the middle of our journals and to tear out images rather than cut them out. She also provided some prompts and lots of ephemera for us to play with. I spent most of the time finding images that spoke to me and getting them on the page instead of writing. However, when I got home on Saturday night, I immediately found more images, got to pasting and added in some writing. I'm afraid this workshop has created a monster! Here are some of my pages:

My ideal weekly calendar. I blocked out work time in pretty colors so all the time dedicated to that was less jarring. Essentially, an ideal weekday would be working out in the morning, followed by a healthy breakfast or a green smoothie, shower and work. After work time would be dedicated to cooking healthy meals and eating dinner with Jesse, yoga, journaling, blogging, reading and catching up with friends and family. Instead of nailing down a weekend schedule, I made a list of things I'd love to spend my weekends doing, which includes sleeping in, going to the farmers' market, reading, road trips, exercise, cooking and baking, etc.

I got on a muted colors kick for quite some time.

I'm not sure what I will do with this page, but I like the layers and love that, thanks to the Oprah magazine issue on poetry, I was able to title it "One Wild and Precious Life".

I loved the soft colors and dreamy quality of these ones. I filled in the spaces between the images with quotes that I like.

One of the prompts Kimberly gave was to find a large image and write over it with a Sharpie marker, responding to this: "Lately, I've been feeling...." I LOVED this! I even went through last night and found a few more large images to get into my journal for later writing. Something about writing over an image feels bold, creative and powerful. It also helped me overcome the writer's block I've been feeling lately.

After the workshop, I headed to Cafe Green with Valerie and Carolyn to catch up (and Carol met up with us too!) and have a late lunch, which you can read more about on Valerie's blog. A perfect Saturday indeed!