I Love You For What You Can Do

The prompt for this week's Journal 52 page was to incorporate hands into your page.  You can read more about the prompt HERE.  

I will admit that I was a little reluctant about this prompt...and that I had a momentary lapse of sanity in regards to it...  Because hands are hard to draw...at least for me...and that's my go to answer to all prompts...I will draw my way out of this.  But that answer just wasn't jiving with this prompt.  I didn't want to do a collage, because fancy cutting gives me the hives, and all the magazines I have are comprised of tiny people with even tinier hands...it was a scissor-phobe's worst nightmare.  At one point, I even thought about doing a hand print turkey like a kindergartner...I was getting desperate.

Suddenly, I realized that, if I did trace my hand, I didn't have to use my whole hand.  I thought maybe I could make mountains by tracing my fingertips and then draw a person standing on them.  I felt like a genius.  But once I started tracing my fingers, I liked how they looked, so I just kept tracing.  Fingertips up the sides of the page.  And then I felt like less of a genius.  I had traced myself into a corner.

But I persevered.  I painted them green.  I liked the color, but still had no clue where to go from there. Then, I decided it couldn't get much worse, so maybe I'd just draw doodles in the fingertips.  I am not a natural doodler, so I was taking another chance.  But, as I have learned, if it gets too bad, a coat of gesso fixes everything...I could always start over.

But as luck would have it, I didn't have to gesso the page out of existence.  I actually thought it looked pretty groovy.  And that's when I decided to get REALLY bold...and traced my whole hand in the middle of the page.  And here's what I ended up with:

I ♥ U 4 what you can do

The thing about my hands is that I am very mean to them.  I call them my "actual man hands"...as in they are beefy and thick-fingered.  The rest of me is pretty thick and beefy as well, so at least we match.

But, as I looked at my chubby hand outline surrounded by those green tangled fingers, I thought to myself, "Wow, hands, look what you can do!"  My little sausage fingers will probably never play the piano, or send text messages without hitting forty letters I didn't mean to hit, but they do enable me to make some really cool art!  They are my fat little translators, taking what my brain says and passing it onto the page with ever-growing skill!  

I was suddenly very proud of my actual man hands...and so I decided to write the journaling: "I love you for what you can do."  I finished up my spread and gave my hands a treat in the form of some cobalt blue fingernail polish.  Which I promptly got gesso on...  But the thought was there, and that's what counts.  

Another thing my hands finished up recently was this spread:

"Who I am comes in waves."

I want to say a big THANK YOU to my friend, Boo, for the fish napkin that inspired this page.  She sent me a plethora of different napkins, which I keep on my desk and pet when I need a pick-me-up.  But I realized I can't just keep petting them forever...I need to use them!  So I picked the one with those colorful fishes and went to town in my gigantic Dylusions journal.

This picture is more true to color than the other...plus, look at me, with my fancy art shot!
It made me feel fancy anyway...

Those colorful fishes totally needed a mermaid to go with them.  I don't know what it is about mermaids, but that's two in close succession...I just did an adorable chubby mermaid for last week's Journal 52 spread (which you can see HERE)!  Apparently mermaids are currently rocking my world...

One last thing my glorious man hands do (in conjunction with my weird brain) is write this blog.  As of this post, my busy little fingers have written 200 posts!  I have 49 followers in total (still makes me feel like a cult leader to say "followers").  

And, thanks to you and your amazing hands, I have 14,865 page views.  That's completely insane to me!  I just want to say a big, humongous THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!! to all of you who made that happen.  Your support and encouragement give me so much happiness that I can't even express it in words.  All I can do is say thank you again (and again and again) for coming to see me, taking the time to leave comments, and for subscribing to my blog.  You all make me feel so proud and excited and extremely lucky and grateful to be a part of the online art community.  Thank you. ♥♥♥