Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Getting Creative... in a new way!

Hi everyone! Danica Favorite here. Recently I had the opportunity to attend a class on art journaling. I've always been fascinated by creativity and creative pursuits- obviously, because I'm a writer. But visual art is something that's always been something I've been afraid of. I'll be honest. I'm not a great artist. I have never been able to do anything in a straight line. But when my friend said she wanted to teach a class on art journaling, I was curious and signed up.

Wow! What a freeing experience! I am in love! The first thing I learned is that you don't have to be good to make art. It reminded me of an art phase I was in while in college. I painted and colored, and did all sorts of artsy things. But I stopped when people told me I wasn't very good at it. Well, I'm not good at it. I'll never win awards or make any money with my art, but you know what? It felt good.

So I've signed up for more art journaling classes. I am in heaven. I'm learning to make my mistakes beautiful and, even better, I'm learning a lot about how to incorporate art into my spiritual life. Even though my kids look at the stuff I'm making and politely tell me it's interesting (code for, can you be any worse at this?), I am so happy!

The photo you see is one of my first attempts at creative lettering. I'm finding it addictive, to be perfectly honest. When I did my first one, I realized that I used to doodle like this all the time. For whatever reason, I stopped, but now that I've learned about art journaling, I'm going to do even more!

Are you an artist? Do you have an art journal? I'm curious to hear what your experiences with art are.

7 comments:

  1. Danica, interesting post. I am only an artist with my granddaughter. She thinks whatever I draw is lovely. :)

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  2. I'm craftie -- no pun intended -- but not really artistic. My husband and son have the art talent. Art journaling sounds interesting. I'd never heard of it before.

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  3. Merrillee, I used to only be an artist with my kids, and then not so much when the older one got really good and didn't appreciate my attempts at art. So now that I'm doing it again, I have one kid who wants to join me and the other rolls her eyes at what an amateur I am. :)

    Jean, I had never heard of it before either, and now that I have, I'm seeing things about it everywhere. It's been really neat to do things like write verses I'm studying in fancy ways to help me learn them. It's pretty, and it's been helping my spiritual life.

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  4. Danica/Dream, I find art journaling fun too. I've been in Bible studies where we had different exercises to do and one was visualize the verse we were studying and then draw it.

    Don't forget that we'll be picking a commenter from today to receive some books!

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  5. Scratch that, tomorrow we're picking a commenter to receive some books. I don't know what day it is or which way is up! Ugh!

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  6. LOL, I don't have an art journal, but I'm writing a romantic suspense where the art journal really has a murder confession 'drawn' in it. It's called What Janie Saw. It will be coming out from Heartwarming new year.

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  7. Terri, I'm taking an art journal Bible study class now. :)

    Pamela, that sounds like a fun story!

    (Hoping this posts- Google and I are having a name war right now because they don't believe I am who I say I am, so they keep disabling my ability to do stuff. :( )

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