Another day of zero inspiration. This page was started at Journalfest and I added some ranting journaling about how tired I am and uninspired. Hope tomorrow is a better day.

Dealing with creative blocks- working through them.

A very straightforward page for today, heavy on journaling and low on collage. A tribute to Cailean, my Scottish Terrier, who is presently sleeping in the doorway of my office studio as I type this in. I've been feeling uninspired to create, never having tried to do artwork every single day. So I met today's challenge this way. I used pictures I have of her in the border of the page.
To the right is yesterday's page, complete with journaling in the form of a quote that I found that fit the image.

Blocked Inspiration

Here's the page for today. I still need to journal on it, but after staring at the page for two days, I thought this was good progress. I will update this post when the page is finished.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Okay, this is a bit lame and unfinished, but I had class tonight and couldn't spend more time on the page. But I do feel that art does clean out the dust from my mind after a long day. I just need more time to do art.

Help from the Blog Fairy

I actually got my scanner to work, and here is today's journal page. I am on my way to bed for a good night's sleep. I will be journaling tomorrow, since I have the day off from work. I am enjoying doing these pages and hope to explore some new techniques this week. I hope if there is anyone out there looking at these that you enjoy them and hopefully feel inspired to join in on the fun and do some art journaling yourself.

Technological Difficulties...Please Stand By

Finally! After having my scanner fail me last night (it would only scan the top half of my journal page) and other problems uploading this image I am finally able to get this post done for yesterday. Now to work on today's journal page. This NaNoJouMo challenge is definitely robbing me of sleep. Let's see if I can get the page done early tonight.

Insane is just a state of mind.

I feel insane working on a page in a hurry to meet a deadline, but I am trying my best to stick out the NaNoJouMo Challenge and here is my page for the day- Nov. 6th - even though it is after midnight and it is actually Nov 7th officially, but it's the thought that counts, right?
I love Alice and Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass. I am looking forward to seeing Tim Burton's take on the story when the movie comes out next Spring. Until then I will ponder this question that has no real answer: Why is a Raven like a writing desk?

Scribble Designs vs. 'Zentangles'

Day 5 of the challenge and I've switched over to my mini journal for this one. I've seen examples of Zentangles on the Internet after a teacher at Journalfest introduced our class to the term. I immediately recognized them as something I've been doing since I was in first grade (a long time ago my friends!) They were called scribble designs and involved a box of crayons and a piece of blank paper. You took out the black crayon and scribbled all over the paper in big loops until you came back to your starting point. Then you had to color in all the spaces with different colors making sure no two spaces had the same color next to them. An easy feat if you had the big box of Crayola 64 (which I'm not sure they offered then, but I know I collected a lot of different colored crayons to do those scribble designs with). I've been doing these off and on for years. Some in black and white (see today's journal page above) some in color (check out my ATC page on my website: www.dianneforrest.com
Try it. It's fun, relaxing, and a challenge to come up with a different pattern to fill in all the spaces. And I do have that highly coveted box of 64 Crayolas. Maybe I'll break them out and use them on a journal page this month.