In 2011 Milliande hosted a month-long series of creative art journalling prompts and it was one of the most enjoyable activities I’ve done for a long time. Milliande had put a great deal of time and thought into creating this series of prompts and I’m happy to post it again as part of the Buried Treasure collaboration.
Buried Treasure
I have finally completed all 24 days of Milliande’s art journal for January 2011:
Day 1 – the prompt was “zebra up your intro page”
Day 2 – the prompt was to create a zendoodle then cut up an enlarged photocopy and use the pieces to create something new
Day 3 – carve your own printing blocks and print them. I used a couple of potato halves for my printing blocks
Day 4 – create a face with zebra accents. I had no materials at hand to do this so I used a magazine image
Day 5 – create a zebra hand
Day 6 – “stripey legs”
Day 7 – the prompt was “stripey windows”
This is the inside of my window – it’s a digital mandala I created. Afterwards, not shown in this scan, I added the words “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
Day 8 – vertical journaling. I used one of those crosswords without black squares for the grid. I used purple food colouring for the background and lifted off some of the colour with kitchen paper.
Day 9 – layered lines
Day 10 – the prompt was “striped dragonfly”
Day 11 – crossword puzzles
Day 12 – daily debris – my daily debris consists of bills and endless cups of tea so I used an envelope with a transparent window and stuck on a number of tea bag envelopes, some postage stamps and did some doodling
Day 13 – taking lines for a walk – we were supposed to draw lines on the page, without any preconceived idea of what you were going to do, then see what the lines suggested to you. Mine ended up as a sunset landscape with the sky, a range of hills, the greenery of hills and fields and then the sea. I used water colour crayons and the colours are very muted in the scan
Day 14 – mirror mirror
Day 15 – Stories of woman
Day 16 – favourite number – I had the most difficulty with this one and am not really happy with it but the whole point of art journalling is that you don’t have to create a perfect piece of finished art
Day 17 – the prompt was “plump pears”. I drew them with watercolour crayons and added the “stitching” in black pen so that they would look as if they have been appliqued
Day 18 – lettering
Day 19 – toy or talisman. Cats are my talismans and I have always had a cat in my life from the age of 5 (although sadly not a cat of my own at the moment)
Day 20 – your front door
Day 21 – bonny bluebells. As children we were often taken to the nearest bluebell wood to see the bluebells, the sight of the carpets of blue always filled (and still does) me with joy
Day 22 – a favourite day in the life of YOU. This is a depiction of typical day on our holiday in Thailand. The rainy season had not finished and we were deluged with torrential rain for most of the day on most of our days. Serendipitously I found the Emerson quote the day I drew this
Day 23 – paper poem – this was supposed to be a found poem but I had no suitable to literature so I created my poem from the Splatt poetry game site (http://www.abc.net.au/splatt/games/poetry/default.htm). The words led to the image I created.
Day 24 – round and round we go
I would have preferred to be able to do these art journal entries in the comfort of my own home with all my art supplies to hand rather than on the move and staying in other people’s houses. However, this forced me to think outside the box and to use whatever I could lay my hands on. I had only used watercolour crayons once before so this was a useful experiment – I must learn to make the colours more substantial. I also found it hard not to want to produce a complete piece of work and to allow myself to experiment and not think too hard. I kept having to remind myself that it was all about experimenting and having fun. I also found that I was less successful with the prompts that didn’t “say” anything to me.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see - Thoreau 