May 31, 2016

This is Spread #27.

Before

Hand written text reads: "I can't part with my tea cups! Tea is meant to be sipped from a proper cup, not gulped from a mug!"

May 23, 2016

Before

I have decide to work randomly through the rest of the book. Each day I will page through until I find a page I want to work on that day. This is spread 26 in the journal.

The handwritten text reads: "No sketch today. Instead an image transfer. The cross is from a funeral program. Have so many of them and funeral prayer cards…too many"

Post IFJM 2016

I had put my book on the shelf and thought I was finished. But it kept nagging at me.  I had so many unfinished pages and I really like my Gelli Plate prints on each page, so yesterday and today I open the book and began working again. No finished work but I stamped 19 more of my hand carved rubber stamps on pieces of vellum; taped out and gessoed 2 squares on 2 pages; collaged paper from cardboard coasters and bags on three pages. Probably not the easies method since I still have to paint on the remaining spreads but this does mean I can throw out all the used and unused hand carved rubber stamps and the bag of extra stuff I was saving to use in the book. Now I just have to get out my gouache and paint. I plan on keeping the same theme which means painting items from my house. The great thing about that is the weather or time of day does not impact my ability to work on the journal.

IFJM 2016 Wrap up

Before

REAL life really got in the way of my International Fake Journal Month journal this year. Two funerals, two waves of out-of-town guests, a retreat, and an art show really ate into my art time. On my list of priorities my IFJM journal comes after my daily sketching and painting. Therefore, I only completed the first 16 days and got starts on 3 other days.  I do plan to finish the last 14 spreads in May. Even with the lack of finished work I still met most of the goals;

1) play with my Gelli Plate (done);

2) work in gouache (liked it enough to order the Scmincke gouache set from Wet Paint that Roz inspired). Think I will like gouache even better when I use it on watercolor paper;

3) sort through my old hand carved stamps (used and threw out 32 of my stamps so far). You can't keep stuff forever.

In addition I used a book from my $1 library sale books stash and used a large selection of pages from a old vellum sample book I stumbled across. So in some ways I was mimicking my character.

Overall I would call this month a success for me personally.

Now as to who my character was. She still has no name and I wanted to keep her sex, age, and occupation as secret as long as possible. She was a single, childless owner of an import business and traveled around the world on buying trips for her entire career. At the age of 66 she had decided to retire and downsize. I was very surprise she wasn't the only character who had similar plans this year. So she was going through her house and determining the disposition of items by checking a sticker KEEP, DONATE, TRASH, or GIVE TO______. Plus documenting memories.