Here I am!

Hello everyone, sorry for the long break. Those of you of you who know me, know that I am bi-polar and also have really bad anxiety, both of which present quite the challange in my life. Sometimes I am much more functional than others, so if you ever don't hear from me for a while, I'm probably just having a hard time. I wanted to be able to add something so I decided to post more of my art journal pages. I highly recommend art journaling to everyone. It is so freeing and especially helpful when having a difficult time. These are not pages that I've done this past week, but more recently than the others I previously posted.

On this page I just layered masking tape and then I took water soluable oil pastels by Portfolio and outlined the pieces of tape and then just smeared it with my finger. I highly recommend this product. Its inexpensive and you can buy them at Staples, Office Max, etc. A pack of 24 colors is about $9. They are nice vibrant colors and smear easily with or without water and you can layer them and blend colors nicely.

This is a page about the Hindu Goddess Sarasvati. She is the goddess of all the arts: music, painting, sculpture, dance and writing. I have a piece of crinkled tissue paper, paint and some melted crayon. I adhered her picture with melted beeswax.

The left page is covered with black artist quality acrylics, which gives it a nice glossy finish. I wrote on top with glitter gel pens. (They're called "The Ultimate Gel Pen" and I love them! They right really smoothly.) The right page is done in dry pastels.

This is the oldest of the pages I'm showing today, but I wanted to show it because it was the first time I used beeswax. You just melt it and then you can paint it right on. It gives a really neat effect. I also used a little melted crayon. I was even able to use the wax to adhere the small Scrabble tiles. Bees wax stays supple so it doesn't dry and crack and fall off.

SO, grab a notebook or sketch pad of some sort and start playing! It is so fun and refreshing. Don't judge, just pretend you're a kid! You can even just use one of those cheap black and white composition books.