Pick-an-Emotion - Any Emotion !

So I have offically joined Leah's Creative Every Day Challenge. I have played along many times but never posted directly to her link page. I felt like it was time for me to commit to something, and I know I will appreciate being part of a group of artists all working towards making creativity a part of their daily lives in whatever form ! Leah is a wonderful guide through the experience and has even recently added in some loose themes to follow along with each month.

I wanted to make my committment to my creative time official and to celebrate how much my creativity and my play time help me feel, help me heal and help me live my life more fully. Appropriately, Leah's theme this month is "play" !

I have also been enjoying seeing the art work that is resulting from the art journal prompts Misty Mawn has been posting everyday for the month of January. I haven't been doing them every day as many have, but there is a lot of inspiration there for me.

This week, Misty encourages us to think about our emotions as we create our pages and to put our emotions into the work. This kind of happens naturally for me - it is what I use my journal for most of the time- to pour out my feelings or sometimes, to try and change my feelings.

Here are two recent pages I have done that definitely both have a lot of my emotion in them.

The first one is called "Gross Gordon" :

"Gross Gordon" was created when I was feeling angry, frustrated and disgusted. I was mad at how some people who have been very hurt in their lives choose to take it out on others, to" pluck their wings off", so to speak. As a person who tends to turn my hurt inwards instead of out (not a good thing either !!!), I have a very hard time forgiving, and definitely cannot excuse people who hurt people who don't deserve it by putting them down, chipping away at their confidence and just being generally mean for no reason ! Especially when the person they attack is weaker than them!!

Oh, oh, Gross Gordon is getting to me again ! Better go make another anger piece ! ;-)

Anyway, I think the anger shows in the color scheme - very limited for me and the grey and black with that wash of red say anger to me. So do the "teeth" surrounding the picture.

The second piece is about a similar theme but a very different emotion. This one is called : "little bird says" (it was made this morning) :

I had great fun doing this page. It was really play time ! It was definitely a many stepped process to create the background. I used all kinds of toys for that ! Stamps, stencils, black gesso, multiple layers of paint, etc. I love the blues, purples and turquoises of the back ground. The little bird door is made of some painted paper glued to pink card stock. It is attached with turquoise duct tape and even has little sequins in the corners and a strip of pink ribbon. I stamped little bird's door and her secret with my favorite alphabet stamps.

The emotion that I think shines through this piece is Hope ! I have been feeling a lot more hopeful for the last few days and I think the piece shows that in the colors, the message and even the use of the little bird...hope that the darkness that has been plaguing me for a while is definitely clearing and that with a little more self-love, a little more "nest" time, I will soon be ready to push myself out of the nest and use those wings as they were intended !