Strathmore workshop do-over and a cupcake

I know I've mentioned before that I've been wanting to take a class with Pam Carriker forever and I was so excited about this Strathmore class and I've been disappointed. HOWEVER. I think the only way to give it a fair chance is to stick it out.

So, I posted a few pages that weren't horrible, but I made them horrible not very long after that. I thought I was following Pam's steps, but I actually skipped the charcoal step and when I tried to use charcoal after adding oil pastels and a gesso wash, the charcoal pencil was peeling away the gesso and a layer of matte medium I'd put on after the gesso. Naturally, I got mad first, but then when I had a similar thing happen with my Ugly Me page, I figured out that it's the oil pastel making that happen - it doesn't bond with the matte medium, or gesso, or anything, so when I try to use something over it that's scratchy like a pencil, everything peels right off down to the oil pastel layer. So I re-watched the Pam videos and she used charcoal THEN oil pastel, then gesso. Got it. Started over.
She's not horrible, but I don't love her, either. We'll see if I can make something good out of her.

This is me having a cupcake at Kelly's because she said once I got 30 blog followers, we were having cupcakes!!

Then she suggested having her mom and sister follow me just to get cupcakes, but we didn't have to resort to that. Thanks, Jess, for being number 30! It's kind of amazing to think there are 30 people who want to read my silly rambles. I hope I'm at least occasionally entertaining.

One of those days...

I've been working in this cartoon journal since January first. The first couple of days I just sort of sat at the table and worked in it all day long, but I can't do that all the time, right? I know I'll get better and faster the more I do this stuff, but some days are just annoying.

(Pinky the fish)

Drawing a face is a lot easier when you have room to draw it big, but when I want to put a couple of people in a scene it's really hard to draw them so small.

(Liam on his birthday)

I intended to make up a cast of characters before I started really working in this journal so I knew what people were going to look like: me, Tim, Liam, Kelly and her family, Tami, Sean and Shanti - people I see or talk to regularly. But I think a BIG part of me thought I would flake out on this project and not complete it. Maybe not even start it. So I never bothered to do that.

(Kelly!)

It's not easy for me. Not at ALL. I think "How hard is it to draw a muffin?" but then when I get started, I spend an hour drawning and erasing and drawing and erasing, and I finally Yahoo it (I don't like Google) and then it only takes me a few minutes, but I've already wasted so long trying to figure it out that I'm annoyed and I don't want to do anymore.

(Me, feeling heavy-headed)

Then there are those days (like today) where I just don't FEEL like drawing. I'm going to make myself because I want drawing to be the thing I do when I'm in this kind of mood. I want it to be my zen place. I'm never going to get there if I don't do it every day. AND I'm going to start adding color to these drawings. It's time, don't you think?

Award and Strathmore class

Joyce gave me a blog award!! It's pretty exciting because there are so many creative blogs out there, and she picked ME! I'm pretty thrilled, but not quite thrilled enough to repost it here. I'm just not a reposter or a forwarder.

My Strathmore class pages are looking worse than ever. I swear I did what Pam said - collaged, iol pastels, gesso wash. Yuck.

This one is NO WHERE NEAR this bright in real life. The picture looks a LOT better than it really looks!!

This one is the least awful of the bunch.

I thought this would be cool with the angel who's wanting to fly and the broken girl with one wing, but I dunno if it actually is cool or if it's just ugly.


And this one has too much background space, but I just don't HAVE a bunch of scraps ready to collage because of two things: one, I hate collage and am terrible at it and two, I throw things away. I am a purger. I love throwing things away. Scraps leftover from a project go in the trash.

I tossed out the scraps from making Fabriano journals when Kelly wasn't looking because I knew she wouldn't let me, but she rescued them after I left her house! We make an excellent team, don't we? :)

Anyway, I'm going to re-watch the Strathmore videos to see if there's anything I can do to these pages to make them better, but don't hold your breath.

Sleepover!

Do people outgrow sleepovers? I think some people probably do, especially people who don't have friends from childhood. Rarely does one adult say to another "You wanna spend the night at my house?" like children do. That being said, me and Liam spent the night at Kelly's last night. It was good times! She has crazy boys and I have a crazy boy and they mostly entertain each other when we toss them together. I like it!

Kelly and I are taking the Strathmore Visual Journal classes (they're free) and the first teacher is Pam Carriker. I was SO EXCITED - a FREE class with Pam Carriker, what could be better?!? Then the class started and I've been SUPER disappointed. I really don't WANT to make copies of my old journal pages and cut out the focal image to glue on another page. Why can't I just draw a new focal image? BUT...I've given in. For my overnight play date with Kelly, I printed some of my old stuff (times two) for us to play with and we collaged.

Then, Kelly's youngest son and Mini Me decided they wanted to collage, too! How cute is that??

Make another journal, of course!

I've been trying to decide what I want to do about the Pam Carriker class I'm taking that starts this week. Since it's given by Strathmore, you'd think I should use one of their journals. BUT I don't have the one Pam is going to use, I only have Britsol ones (4 of them in various sizes...) and when Ajae sent me the one I'm now using for Manga, my first thought was "Yay, I'll use this for Pam's class!" but that was very quickly followed by "Heck no, I wanna draw in it TODAY, and it's my favorite paper, and I'm going to use it for Manga." Case closed. So (you needed those babbling thoughts, trust me) I've been trying to find them online because the only place around here where you can get them is in St. Paul which is about 20 minutes away and you have to park on the street which I'm not comfortable with so I always park at a grocery store and walk several blocks but it's 37 degrees and raining (this is not good because of the huge piles of snow that are going to melt and then freeze later, making the roads into an ice skating rink for your car) and I have Mini Me - who would not appreciate a sprint in the rain. And I realized the journals are kind of expensive for a class. I mean $14 is not so much for a journal, less than I pay for my beloved Moley, but what if I start playing the Pam Way and I hate it? Then the journal sits on a shelf for the next fifty years and Liam throws it away after I'm dead. I decided instead to make journals for me and for Kelly so we have something already done that we didn't spend any money on and that way if we hate it, we can just chuck it in the trash. (Yes, I often toss my art in the trash if I hate it. It's just how I roll.)

So, this is just file folders sewn together:I used patterned cardstock for the covers, just glued it onto the first and last folders.

Added some decorative tape to the bound edge.

And this is the backs! (Or fronts. No right or wrong here.)

I don't know why I took this picture of it open, but apparently I needed it, so I might as well show you. The pages are 10x7 inches. I'm thinking this is my "perfect" journal size. We'll see.