Creating Art Beautifully....

So the goal of the Big Hearts Walking Play Date was not to create beautiful art. The goal was to create art beautifully. And that is what we accomplished !

I planned out the activities for our afternoon together, combining ideas I got from the wonderful Sarah Whitmire's Soul Journal exercises, from Sarah Ahearn's workshop at Squam "Text and Images", a bit of the incredible Judy Wise's Play Book class fun, and a good strong dose of my own play time ideas and great teacher organizational skills. I think it turned out well, especially as I made it a priority to listen to all the participants and to gauge when things needed to change or adapt to the flow.

Our first activity was a treasure hunt in a magazine. We all had the task of looking for a few items such as words that popped out at us, sets of eyes, a "good" face, and a body positioned in an interesting pose.

The treasures that we found would be built on in the next activities. For example, the posed figure was to become a mask or a stencil when carefully cut out like the one above that I did.

The treasure hunt complete, we moved on to creating a collaborative page in our journals. Each of us started with painting one page in our favorite color. Then prompted by a series of cards I had created, we would pass our journal to the person to our right and do the action that the prompt suggested. The prompts had things like add the date to your page, add some circles, finger paint in one section, do a doodle in one section, add a collage element, add some words, and so on...

After we all complete the prompt, we passed our journal to the next person, and continued until we had our own journals back - so five elements had been added to the page when the circle was complete.

Here are our pages after that collaborative prompt activity was completed...

Kriss's page - collage element added by me - a doodle from my book

Gretchen's page - cool numbers for the date, right ?

Colleen's page - funky scribble writing at the bottom !

Jill's page - don't you love that finger painted orange corner ?

Corrine's page - love the fuchsia on the light blue...

Kim's page - love the words "warm, cozy, sunny" when it was snowing outside !

I think it was how we were feeling inside !

At this point, we decided as a group to work on either finishing these pages in our own way or on starting a new page and keeping the collaborative page for finishing up at a later date. I had a second set of prompts that were geared towards adding things to our own pages. Some of us used these to keep the flow going. Other people just felt like doodling on backgrounds they had in their journals already. And others used the "treasures" they had gathered from the first activity to create new pages.

The rest of our time was just spent chatting, playing in our journal, sharing stories, pausing to show tools or techniques that we used and basically enjoying the time and the process. What a treat to not worry about end results and just play in a safe, fun environment with supportive chickies all around you !

We asked Jackie, the owner at Talk Paper Scissors, to take photos of our gang.

Colleen had brought along her new latest sweet gizmo, A PoGo Polaroid Printer, which prints shots the size of a business card when hooked up to a camera. Above is the shot of us that we each got a little copy of right on the spot !

This is where my page ended up after my play time...

It still has work to be done on it but I was happy with where it is going...

You can see where I used the mask of the funky figure to create the shape in my journal. I used a make-up sponge and fushia paint around the edges of the figure. I them drew in the lines with india ink.

Kind of funny, isn't it, that a group of artists come together and the resulting art work becomes almost secondary ? But as I said, the main goal of us getting together was to be in the moment, enjoy the process and take that special time out of our often way too busy lives just to be creative.

Ahhhh, what can I say...it was so very very good for the soul in so very very many ways...

And this filled-up Queen already has the seeds of the next one germinating in her head....

Happy Tuesday, Beautiful Ones !