What's It All About?

Art Journal

Acrylics, watercolor crayons, ink

I'll start at the beginning when I sat down to do something in my journal today.  When you don't have an idea for the overall page (9x12), it helps to break it up by creating boxes of different sizes and then decide what's to be in each box.

Here's the sketch....

What's on your mind?  I didn't write anything here, but these boxes do represent things going on in my mind.  I won't elaborate, but suffice to say, the largest box has a baby boy and next month is my son's 28th birthday...

Below is the first box I added color to with my watercolor crayons...

It's of course, easy to fill in the parts of the boxes you absolutely know what you want to do to them.  The rest became a progression.  A close-up of the baby below.  The tiny little bed in the box above his head...could represent the sleepless nights I have!  

Perhaps I yearn for those nights when I used to sleep like a baby....but I think those were way before the baby!  And the baby's been out of the house for awhile....This is an exercise I would do again.  More boxes, fewer boxes, animal vegetable, mineral....I've debated putting a stain over the entire page, but I'm afraid I might ruin it.  The colors are bright....

OK, I put a coat of Decou-Page over the picture and then sprayed walnut stain on it and then wiped the stain off.  Some of the white stars in the moon square ended up fading a bit but I like the effect.  That's it for now.