Regrets

When I was a little girl, I used to get told quite often...especially by kids in school...that I looked like Wednesday Addams.

Basically me as a child...besides the movie money...

Looking back, it was probably true.  I had a big forehead, and a similarly turned up nose, and large dark eyes...and unrelated to Wednesday, I wore my hair in pigtails pretty often...I had LONG hair...I was always sitting on it otherwise.  If I could find a picture of me as a kid, you'd see what I mean.  Not identical, but close enough for others to notice the similarity.

Possibly because of this, I developed a (not so) secret (anymore) love of Christina Ricci, the actress who played Wednesday in the Addams family movies.  I like that I have embraced something that was kind of scarring as a child.  

Sadly, I no longer look like Christina Ricci.  Although if she'd gain like a hundred pounds, maybe I would...come on, Christina, help a sister out!

Even though Christina and I have gone our separate ways looks-wise, my mild obsession with her hasn't changed.  

The picture above was the face inspiration for the spread I have to show you today:

Ta-da!  I considered leaving it like this, but it was just not right...it bothered me.

"One of my main regrets in life is giving considerable thought to inconsiderate people." - Jarod Kintz
I really liked the quote (and feel like it related to how I've been feeling recently) and I thought it fit the expression on the girl's face, but it was so plain looking...

And I think the same was true of the face...it was ok, but just needed a little more...oomph...

So here's what I did to the quote side. At first, I just tried to color in the spaces of the letters with my Inktense pencils, but that wasn't enough.  Then I doodled over that with a black fine tip marker...the black stuck out too much... So, I went over the letter part with a lime poster paint Sharpie, which was better, but it didn't show up that well, so I went over that in black Sharpie...and that was good enough to make me stop working on the lettering part.  I also added some doodles in the corners in Inktense pencil and red poster paint Sharpie...and went squiggly around the edges with that same red Sharpie.

I didn't do much to the girl, but the changes I did make made a big difference in my eyes. I used white paint pen to give her eyes some highlights...that's a little thing that makes a HUGE impact...I am willing myself to never forget eyeball highlights again...  I also used the same red poster paint Sharpie from the quote side and added it to her lips, which made her look much less pale and much more dimensional (I think so anyway...).  And I used the red sharpie in her hair and on the outline of her shirt sleeves...  Just those few little changes made me much happier with the end result.  

Oh, and on a side note, I totally swiped a broken date stamp from the trash at work...you can see it in the bottom left corner of the girl's shoulder.  It actually said "Received" with the date underneath, but Regrets girl will probably be the only piece that gets the "Received" stamped on her, because it was too hard to hold it together...the date part is held together within the stamp, but the "received" kept falling off.  So sadly, it is sitting there all alone on my desk...waiting for me to accidentally knock it to the floor and lose it forever...  Ooh...unless I go right now and find something to glue it to...oh, yay!  Hooray for you brain, you figured it out!  OK...I'm off to rummage...  (maniacal laugh, MANIACAL LAUGH!!!)

What's in My head Versus Reality

I've been thinking a little about that saying 'there's three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.'  except for my brain got sidetracked.  What started out as thinking about the 'three sides to the story' thing turned into me thinking about the way I view things compared to the way things are...in other words, what's in my head versus reality.

I'm one who has been blessed and cursed with a good imagination.  There are things that are REALLY great about it, like being able to 'see' the scenes in the books I read and being able to think up all sorts of things for my art journals.  I can imagine what color combinations will look like when I'm wanting to crochet a scarf in a certain pattern.  Creatively, my imagination has been a huge help to me.

But my imagination is also a defense mechanism.  All my life, when things are very bad, I've imagined myself out of those bad situations.  When I was a little girl, growing up with a father who was generally a terrible person, being able to pretend things were different was how I survived.  People always think of me as strong, but what they don't realize is that I've just got a very strong imagination...  When bad things were happening, I wasn't there...I was off in my brain in some other place.  I think this is part of the reason I don't have a lot of memories of my childhood...because I wasn't there to make memories.

This imagination of mine has stuck with me into adulthood as well.  When I lost someone I dearly loved to suicide, I concocted a series of stories in my mind so that I wouldn't have to deal with the loss.  He's not dead...it was all a hoax...he's in witness protection somewhere, alive and happy and missing me as much as I miss him.  And I let myself believe this story with all my heart, because it was so much easier to imagine that he was out there somewhere still getting to see and feel and live than to let myself come to terms with the fact that he was gone and that the last words I said to him were horrible and mean and the biggest lie I've ever told in my life.  But for as long as I let myself believe this imagined story, I got no closure.  I couldn't let go of him.  I kept waiting for him to come back to me.

And that's not reality.  I finally came to realize that it will never happen, no matter how badly I want it to.  All I was doing was torturing myself.  Sure, it spared me in the beginning, when it was all too much to deal with, but for two whole years, I let myself believe the story.  For 24 months, I sat and waited on someone who would never show up.  That's not healthy...it took me long enough, but I figured it out...  And when I finally made myself let go of the pretend scenario I had created, I had a HUGE crash of grief.  Bone-shattering grief.

But something changed at that point.  Instead of having this open wound on my heart, it slowly started to heal.  I know I will always have a scar jaggedly running down the center of me, but I finally, finally let the wound close.  I didn't feel like all my life was slowly leaking out of me anymore.  I felt empty at first...so tired and cold from sadness and anger and disappointment and all the feelings that come along with such a thing. But as the hole in my heart scabbed over, I could feel myself improving...slowly, a tiny bit at a time, I was getting better.  I know I will always have this mark, and honestly, it will always be my favorite scar, because I wouldn't have it if I hadn't loved so hard and been loved so sincerely in return.  All the other things that have caused me pain in my life, none of them had any love in them at all.  But this one, this most agonizing pain, was one I felt because there was so much love at the core.

You would think that I would have learned my lesson...that I would have realized that it's better to accept reality than to delude myself into believing lies.  You would think I could have put A and B together a little faster...clearly I have taken my sweet time about it.  Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, you know...

It may have taken me a while...a good long while...but I'm finally seeing that I need to stop my imaginings when it comes to daily life.  When a situation is bad, I need to do something about it, instead of just pretend it's not there.  I can't spend the rest of my life living in a world of make believe.

I'm not saying I'll never use my glorious imagination again...but I'm going to try as hard as I can to never use it as a way to escape from things that I don't want to deal with.  Instead, I need to be truly strong and actually deal with things.

In the midst of all this thinking, I threw myself a little pity party and made this:

"Your heart's a thousand colors but they're all shades of blue." -Gregory Alan Isakov 

I had planned on making it an addition to Gregg (I told you he was my knew obsession...), taping down the heart and writing the lyrics mentioned in the caption onto Gregg's actual page.  Because I was having a pity party, I thought these lyrics applied to me so well...  Everything is sad and blue and I'm such a wimp and waa waa waa....  

But that's not true...that's my mean imagination playing tricks on me.  I do feel sad that I've used my imagination to escape from life...but there are so many other things in my heart, good things that aren't shades of blue at all!  I've got love in my heart.  I've got friends that are so very dear to me.  I've got my nice imagination, the parts of it that help me be creative and the parts that help me look beyond the surface and see what could be with a little bit of elbow grease.  I've got a million other colors in my heart.  And just because some days they seem to be hit with a blue light, it doesn't really mean they ARE blue.  So just sit back and be quiet, mean imagination...because I don't need you or want you anymore.  

A Plan For A Book

I don't know if you are aware, but I have a love for outdated vintage things.  I just want to point out, however, that I'm not some lame hipster that "liked it before it was cool".  Although I did like vintage before it was cool...at least before the whole vintage-is-cool thing cycled back in my lifetime.  I have come to realize that ALL trends are cyclical and therefore, nobody alive now has liked anything 'before it was cool' because everything is a gigantic repeat...  So I both liked vintage before it was cool and did not like it before it was cool at the exact same time.  

Did I just blow your mind with that ramble?  Hehehe...  This is the kind of thinking that goes on in my head all day every day...my brain is very random.  (Yes, it IS exhausting...)  But I digress...

Back to the original point, I love vintage things...of all sorts.  I really enjoy what I call "hideous 70s"...a lot of my favorite things in my house fit into this category.  I don't think they're hideous, I love them, but most people who see these things would say "Yuck!  Look at that hideous 70s *insert name of thing here* ."  I tend to grab what I like and I love that nothing I own matches...it's a big pile of random junk that all happens to make my random brain super happy. 

I also love old pictures...the candid daily life kind especially.  I like to make up funny stories about the people in the pictures and pretend that they are my eccentric extended family.  

I also LOVE books.  All books.  Every book.  Just for being a book.  Especially old books...but really all books... I JUST LOVE BOOKS!  

When I was a little girl, we used to go to the library in the town we lived in (Lisbon, Ohio), which was old and glorious, the Lepper Library (you can read a little history about the library HERE):

Yes...look at the how amazing it is!  I did a google search to see if I could find any pictures of it and I saw this one...(there are more if you want to see it during the day, just google Lepper Library Lisbon Ohio)...This picture does a great job at portraying how extremely magical this place was to me as a child...and how warm my memories of it are as an adult.  I don't have a whole heaping lot of good memories from when I was a kid, but this place is one of my precious few.  I can remember they used to have a gigantic lop-eared bunny named Bookmark that belonged to one of the librarians that stayed at the library during the day and you could pet him!  And I remember this library has THE BEST old book smell of any old book smelling place I have every smelled in my life.  

In part because of the Lepper Library, I have a huge amount of love and respect for all books.  I love them. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.

I have wanted to make a book into an art journal for a long time now.  I've seen a lot of different versions of this all around the internet, and really like the way they look.  They are just awesome and I really wanted to start one of my own quite a lot.

So when I was visiting my brother and sister in Ohio and we went to the fabulous Roger's sale (it's a gigantic flea market that is also one of my precious few good memories from when I was a child)...the same day I got my STINKING AWESOME vintage typewriter...and I bought this old book and another one for fifty cents a piece:

I knew to look for a sewn binding and a cover that was in good condition...and so I picked this guy...for fifty cents, a total bargain!

Look at that!  I think it's so neat that people actually know how to do this...or did...I don't know if shorthand is still used in a practical way...maybe it's what court room stenographer people use?  I don't know if she can read this, but I know that my mom knows/knew how to read and write in Gregg shorthand.  I'm not gonna lie...I kind of want to learn it just to say I know how.  But then again, when I think about it, I am a pretty fast writer and my handwriting is so horrifyingly bad that it's basically illegible to others, so I must be very proficient in Sweet's shorthand...

I'm a reasonably fast typer...between 55 and 60 words a minute with 100 percent accuracy...(thank you, thank you, I will be signing autographs after the show... haha)...I value the accuracy over the speed...  at any rate, this book is saying that it wants you to shorthand 70 words per minute!  That's stinking crazy!  As you can see, there are practice letters in the book, so you can increase your speed through diligence.  The best thing is that there are pages of definitions for various industries that required one to know shorthand, including banking and law...but there were also definitions for automotive and aviation as well...just how many mechanics had secretaries taking dictation for them???

So I really love this book...it's been sitting in my studio since I got back from Ohio...I've been looking at it everyday.  I open it up...touch the pages lovingly...stick my nose in the pages and give it a sniff (that's not weird!  I love how old book smell smells!  STOP JUDGING ME!!!)...caress the cover gently...then tenderly lay it down and say 'not today beautiful...not today...'  I just couldn't seem to make myself take action...I know, I know... I have issues...  But I just couldn't hurt the book...until today...when I finally did this:

I kind of wanted to cry when I first started ripping...there may have been a lump in my throat...  I said STOP JUDGING ME!!!  I KNOW it's weird!  I will be keeping these pages to use as well, so they're not going to waste.  I use ALL the buffalo when I kill it...I show it honor and respect in that way.

I just had to make myself do it.  I had bought Gregg, which is what I will be calling this journal from now on, with the sole intention of making him into an art journal.  That's the whole reason I got him!  I HAD TO DO IT GREGG, I'M SORRY!!!  I kind feel like Tom Hanks in "Castaway" when Wilson (the volley ball) gets lost at sea...

"GREGG!!!!  I'M SORRY, GREGG!!!"  *me sobbing hysterically*

But then it was all over and I was on a plane going back to the woman who had moved on because she thought I was dead.  ...oh wait...that was Tom Hanks...

What I did was make this page:

I tried my best to be respectful of Gregg...I am remaking the book with love.  I couldn't bear to cover over the copyright dates (1932, 1938...just think about all the people who touched Gregg in his lifetime!  AMAZING!)  on the left page, so I added in the date I started on remaking him and added my name to the copyrights as well.  In the end, he will be as much mine as he is yours, The Gregg Publishing Company, so deal with it!  I was thinking about how it would be poetic justice for this book to be worth a huge wad of cash if I hadn't started to alter it...it would serve me right for viciously ripping out Gregg's pages...

I used a napkin given to me by my friend Cheryl to create the above page.  I do believe that this was one of the first care packages I ever received, and I hadn't used any of the neat things she sent me!  I was scared to use them because they are so special to me!  But I finally coaxed myself into doing it, realizing that Gregg had sacrificed his old life in order to make me happy, so if I could, I should show him just how much I appreciate it by using things that are special to me to decorate his pages.  Additionally, in M3, one of the Facebook groups I'm in, there's a challenge going on to use things other people have given you in a piece, so this is one of the things I worked on for that challenge.  I really wanted to keep it simple this time, I didn't do a huge amount of altering the napkin, and there's not a whole heaping lot going on...but I REALLY like how it turned out...it looks kind of vintage still and I like that...I feel like it shows respect to Gregg's former life...all that good stuff...

And then again, completely different from the first page in the book and in keeping with my love of random randomness, I thought I would also add some things to Gregg's pages in this manner:

I went a little wild with the washi tape...but I like how this ended up looking quite a bit...She looks even better in real life!   I drew her with a black micron and colored her in with Sharpie poster paint markers...I still really like the poster paint markers much better than the regular Sharpie paint markers...I need to find a white one really badly and see if it's as awesome as the other colors... I am happy I added this gal to Gregg's pages...I believe there will be more of this type of addition in the future...  Perhaps some of my favorite ICAD cards that I don't know what else to do with...maybe a few of my lesser loved Happy Thoughts...the ones that no one shows an interest in...which I do have some more Happy Thoughts ready to be shared, I just need to change my typewriter ribbon so I can get the word parts pasted down...and then we'll have a Happy Thoughts free-for-all again!

I can't wait to put more into Gregg...I have a feeling he's going to be a much different style journal than my others...and I'm pretty excited about that!  

For a while, I was kind of concerned about finding 'my style'.  You know...how you can look at art and just know without a doubt it's by a certain person.  For a while, I wanted that SO BAD!!!  I can't lie, I am still a little jealous of people who have found their niche.  I love to be able to go on the Facebook groups I'm in or be on a blog I love and say "Now that's a classic so-and-so beauty right there!"  But I don't think that will ever be me...and I'm ok with that.  I've come to see that I'm a random person...I like what I like and do whatever comes to mind... and my art journal pages will always probably be just as random as I am.  Maybe I'm wrong, and I do have a style...I know I do faces a lot, but I think they're always too different to be known as 'my style'...  I'm interested in what you all think about that...do you think I have a style?  Can you identify my stuff as mine without knowing it's mine (and if so, how do you know)?  Or am I right and I'm totally random?  I'm interested in what you think about everything, so as always, any comments are appreciated and loved beyond words.    

I'm off now to go find some delicious and healthy food to eat...  Big squishes to you all!