Unintentional Hiatus and The Current State of Things

Well...it's been two weeks since I posted, and that's just too dang long!

I didn't intend to have this temporary hiatus at all...life just throws craziness at you sometimes, you know?  Or sometimes my personal craziness throws itself center stage in my life...maybe that's a better way to say it...

I was so excited for the long weekend for July 4th...and then when it happened, I found myself in a blue funk.  I don't know why, I don't know where it came from...things had been going so well...but then...BLAMO!  Horrible melancholy.

And you can see the funk in my art.  Here are my Documented Life Project spreads for the last two weeks and Journal 52 piece for last week (the J52 spread for two weeks ago is in the last post):

"How much time have I spent looking for something that I seem to know I'll never find?"

The prompt for this one was to use a crossword, sudoku, or word search in your art, and you can see in the picture that I used a word search as the background (of all the surfaces) in this spread.

I call him a Pega-corn (cross between a Pegasus and a Unicorn)...because Uni-sus doesn't sound very cool.
I think my Pega-corn has a nice butt...I strongly admire the butt...

I couldn't think of anything at all to do for this prompt, because of the blue funk, so I just started smearing paint with a credit card.  

Poor, sad little dude...

When the paint dried, I saw the basic shape for the sad little dude above, so he was where I started...after that, I saw the Pega-corn...and then the rest...

"I suppose I love this world in spite of my clenched fists."
I think the guy on the right looks like he's going to punch the flame-y dancer in the face...I don't know what the flame-y dancer did to deserve it, but here we are...

And the journaling popped into my head, in part because of the word search, and in part because of finding the shapes in the paint, and in part because of the idea of looking for things that are make believe, but mostly because I was in a blue funk and couldn't think of any thing happy to write...

I am a fan of this mermaid, because she is chunky and has saggy boobs like me...we get sick of all those famous mermaids and their perky boobs!  Plus, I think her tail looks sassy...like she's walking the plus size mermaid catwalk...

The blue funk continued for the Journal 52 prompt of Nostalgia:

"I always thought I would look back at my tears and laugh,
but I never thought I would look back at my laughter and cry."
-Cat Stevens

The color scheme is nostalgic/retro to me: red and robin egg blue.  And the quote...I think Nostalgia should be good thoughts...but my blue funk had other ideas, and I saw that quote on Pinterest and went with it...

By the time the next DLP prompt, to use a tiny picture, came up, I was getting pretty darn sick of being sad:

"I am tired of being so very sad."

But the fact that I was tired of it did not stop the funk from existing.

So I started doing the Summer of Color challenges that I agreed to partake in, but ended up being severely behind:

"You can't add apples and oranges."
Sorry for the blurry photo...
Week 1 colors: Aqua, Yellow, and a smidgen of Hot Pink

The apples and oranges page is probably the most boring page I've made (at least in my eyes) in a long time...but the thought behind it was a reminder that some things just don't work together, no matter how much you try to force it.  ...like my plan to get out of the funk, which has been unsuccessful thus far (at the time of the page, that is...)

"Lost in space"
Week 2, Coral, Teal, and a pop of Bright White
The coral isn't coming across so coral-y in this picture, but I assure you, it's very coral-y indeed.

I don't know why it is, that when I feel depressed, the tendency is to isolate myself...when what I really need is to be around people.  Even though I know that to be true, my blue funk was telling me to stay at home and be a sad, lonely wiener...even to the point of neglecting the blog and my online art friends, which/whom I love very much!  At the point of the above art journal page, I was feeling very cut-off from everything.  I think it's easy to forget when you are in a blue funk, that other people have blue funks too, and so you are not alone in your struggle against the funk.

"Kiss me so I remember how." -Gregory Alan Isakov "Astronaut
Week 3, Lavender, Gray, and a smudge of Plum
I couldn't find a Lavender paint, so I used a color called "Orchid" which is like a grayed out Lavender...I think it added to the sadness of the page...

The journaling on the above page was taken from this song:

That bald gal looks so sad to me...she is having a blue funk too, I guess.  I really like that song (and Gregory Alan Isakov's music in general) and I've been wanting to use that line for a really long time...but the page had to be right, and that bald gal appeared and she turned out to be just right...because to me she looks sad, but also like she's questioning something...like she's looking for comfort...and to me, that's what the lyrics suggest too...

"There is a fine line between genius and crazy...I like to use that line as a jump rope!"
Week 4, Pink, Apple Green, and a splash of Dark Green
I saw that girl on Pinterest, but the link only goes to a picture, not a site (See the original here).  I loved her so much that I pretty much blatantly copied her as well as I could.  I wish I knew who the artist is, so that I could see more of their work, because I do love the girl!

So, as you can might guess from the journal page above, the blue funk cloud did eventually lift.  Thanks to a ground hog...

Over the weekend, I was walking to the house from my car, saw 'something' move, and yelled "HOLY CRAP!" because it startled me.  My husband (who is, shall we say, not a fan of wild life) heard me and came to the door to see why I hollered.  I pointed and said "Look, it's a ground hog.'  At which point my husband sees the ground hog and shuts the screen door, holding the handle securely, effectively locking me out of the house, and says: "GET RID OF IT!  GET RID OF IT!  IT COULD HAVE RABIES!!!"  (I wish I was joking...but it gets better...)  So I go grab a hoe out of the shed, to shoo the ground hog with.  To which my husband shouts (through the screen door) "DON'T KILL IT!"...which I was not going to do...he just put it in my head that the ground hog might be rabid, and I wanted some way to defend myself against the theoretically rabid ground hog in case it turned on me while I was shooing it off the porch.  

So, ground hogs either have bad eye sight, are really stupid, or, in this case, genuinely rabid...because I had to gently bonk the ground hog in the nose with the hoe to get it to move off the porch...  It proceeds to run around the house and get on the other porch...the one my husband enters and exits the house by...so you know it couldn't stay there either...at least not according to my husband, who tells me to shoo it off that porch (still from the 'safety' of the indoors, of course).  So I successfully shoo it off that porch, at which point the ground hog runs under my husband's car.  

And my husband insists that I can't leave it there either, because it's rabid and he will come out of the house to go to work and the ground hog will bite his ankle when he goes to get in the car and he (the husband) will then die from rabies.  So I spend the next 30 minutes trying to shoo the ground hog out from under the car, by using the hoe to slowly scoot him.

At last I was successful at getting him out from under the car, and he started scurrying down the road, with me chasing him, hoe still in hand, hollering "Go!  Get out of here!  Get!"

As I am chasing the ground hog down the road, (slowly, for I am a chunky gal) he stops every 10-15 feet and looks back at me, as though he can't believe what he's seeing.  Three times!  Finally, I'm so frustrated I just yell "GO IN THE WOODS!!!"  I kid you not, the ground hog then runs into the woods.  I couldn't make this crap up!

I thought of a few things in that moment:

1.   I'm really happy I don't have close neighbors...because I wouldn't want anyone else to have witnessed  this little adventure with their own eyes...
2.  My husband is willing to sacrifice me to save himself. (This time it was a ground hog...what if it's a bear next time?!?)
3. Ground hogs don't run very fast, and apparently, neither do I.  Which is why I'm glad there were no neighbors to see me losing the race against the ground hog...
4.  I am pretty sure that, to the groundhog, I looked like a tribe of cannibals in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, that when Bugs escaped, stood at the edge of their island angrily shaking their spears above their heads and yelling cannibal gibberish...the only difference is that I was holding a hoe, not a spear and yelling Hillbilly gibberish...
5. What would have happened if I would have just yelled "GO INTO THE WOODS" at the ground hog in the first place?

The positive thing about that whole experience is that it was so comical that the haze of blue funk lifted...and I made the pink and green page, commemorating the fact that I am probably a genius and/or insane...but in a battle of wits with a ground hog, I will eventually come out victorious.

"On bad days, when you want to hide yourself from the world, remember that there's always someone out there longing to see your glorious face.  Try to never waste the love in their eyes."
Week 5, Red, Royal Blue, and a pop of Light Blue
My take on Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf...my Wolf loves Red...

The Red and Wolf spread is to remind me that instead of isolating myself when I feel sad, I need to remember that people care about me...and that being around others will help me to flee the funk.  Even if those "others" end up being a ground hog that let me bonk it on the nose and have a comedic adventure just to get me to feel better!  How could I be sad after that?!?

I'm going into this week feeling better than I have been, and working to keep that up!  No more blue funks allowed for a while...life's too short for too many blue funks!

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.  

On and on...

Words can't really express my gratitude for all the kind and beautiful comments from yesterday's post.  Every single on of them made my heart swell  with love.  You can't imagine how much you all lift me up and make me want to just give you gigantic smooches and squishes.  Thank you all so very much.

I was thinking about all the kind comments I received yesterday while I was trying to work on the spread for my BOD (Book of Days) journal.  I also had some music going on in the background, as I always do.  There was this serendipitous moment where I stopped working and looked up at the computer, still having the comments from yesterday's post on the screen, and my eyes landed on my lovely Pamikins comment where she wrote: "please understand, your legacy will live on Your art speaks volumes, it will always live on" (What a HUGE compliment!)  and the song in the background was playing and the lyrics were "She's still got infinity ahead of her".  And I stopped in my tracks, poured some gesso over the page I had originally started and began working on this:

"She's still got infinity ahead of her..."  napkin, Dylusions, stencils, die cuts, Silks acrylic glazes, glittery border stickers, Aquamarkers, and shimmery (I wanted to call it pearlescent...but spell check is telling me that's either not a word or REALLY not spelled right) acrylic paint

Also a moment of awesomeness is that I used a napkin that my darling Pamikins had sent me in a care package...I didn't realize it till after I'd glued it down, but I do believe that paisley napkin came from her!  So Paminkins, you get a whole heap of credit today!

And, to a lesser extent, this song also gets some credit:

Really, all the comments from yesterday and every day before share the credit.  I know I wouldn't be where I'm at know if it weren't for the loving and the encouragement and the keep-at-it's that folks have been kind enough to bestow on me.  I guess what I'm saying is that it takes a village to raise a Sweet Red Clover...and you all are my village.

Blog-Along and Second Chances

Hello good people and welcome to day 1 of Blogalong with Effy.  Here's my attempt at 30 posts in 30 days. We're just gonna call it an attempt till it actually happens, ok?  No pressure...no pressure...  To learn more or to join in the fun yourself, please click on the Blogalong link in the left sidebar.

After the relative success of the layers on the last post, I got really inspired to try to fix some of the pages that have been sitting in my journals in a state of limbo.  Ugly, unfinished...both...  Anyway, I've got one to share with you today:

This page started out as an attempt to use Artist acrylic paints.  I have been admiring other people's use of them, so I got myself the basic colors (red, yellow, blue, black and white) to see how I fared.  In my head, they were going to be exactly like craft acrylics...they are NOT.  I can mix colors of craft acrylics with relative ease...getting exactly the color I hoped for in a matter of minutes.  Artist acrylics are not that way for me.  So I had stuck down some of the red and yellow on the page and mixed them a little to a really red leaning orange.  And this page sat untouched for several months because it was so eye-gougingly BRIGHT, practically painful to look at, and I had no idea what to do with it.

So I thought to myself, what bothers me about this page so much...and it was the extreme brightness that bothered me the most.  So I grabbed some Vintage Photo Distress Stain and went over the whole page to tone it down.  Phew...eyeball relief!  So the brightness was gone, and that helped a lot, but what to do next...

I've been watching some of Donna Downey's Inspiration Wednesdays on YouTube (which are SO interesting to watch...I love her "let's just try it and see what happens" attitude).  And she uses ink drops in a lot of her pages.  So I thought I might add some ink drops and see what happens...  What happened was I realized that there is some kind of magic technique to getting splattery drops that I have not learned yet...I really need to watch more closely when she ink drops I guess...  I ended up with pretty uniform circles of ink...not splaterry goodness.  So I improvised and turned my journal in a couple different directions so that the drops would run.  And WHAM!  It suddenly turned into something I liked and I knew where I wanted to go...

I have had that Tim Holtz "Fanciful Flights" die cutter forever, and I never use it, but it popped into my brain, so I grabbed it, cut out the shapes and went over them with some Glossy Accents.  While that dried, I got some Kraft Glassine (which is AWESOME) and crinkled and colored it using Distress Stains.  ...I just realized that this page could be an advertisement for Ranger products...where's my money Ranger???...  (haha...but seriously, pay me...)  I assembled my little butterfly dealie...and before anybody mentions it, I put the wings on backwards on purpose.  Seriously.  Seriously!!!  I think they look cooler that way!  Or at least different...make it your own, right?...  Then I outlined the butterfly in a red poster paint sharpie (I have found that the poster paint sharpies work a lot better for me than the other 'paint' sharpies, by the way!  I really want to get a white one and see if it works as well as the other colors...I have had bad luck with the other white 'paint' sharpies...maybe the poster paint one will tickle my fancy...)  Then I began the multi layered journaling of "If it weren't for second chances..." (a fitting line for this page that I picked out of the song below) I put gold sharpie, the red poster paint one, black sharpie and at last used a Pen-touch white pen which is where it finally stood out enough to be readable...so really, if it weren't for third, forth, or fifth chances, this writing would not have happened...