A Little Joy

 I am so glad that I signed up for the last round of Roz Stendahl’s online class called “Textures: Backgrounds for Visual Journaling and Mixed Media”. The class started on Saturday. 

My reaction to the pandemic and the aftermath of the civil unrest stole some part of my creativity. It was coming back slowly and never completely went away thanks to my knitting, but a big part of it has been missing.

In the last several days, I’ve caught myself thinking on more than one occasion, “I wonder what would happen if” in response to thinking about creating a new first layer as part of this week’s homework. It's a good place to be and it makes me feel like that part of me which has been missing is starting to return. 

So far doing a few new first layers each day makes me feel like I am a little kid playing with finger paint.

This is my favorite one so far.  After brushing some paint on damp paper, I used the rare, but very effective art tool, know as a scrap piece of plastic shelf liner from IKEA.

As class continues, my guess is that we will be adding onto our first layers and covering parts of them up. For this one, I will probably keep it "as is". 

Since I liked this one so much, I did a follow up with a rubber stamp I carved several years ago.

One thing I like about this is when I open my sketchbook, I want have this big, white empty piece of paper staring back at me. It got me thinking about my relationship to color, but that is a post for another day!