4th Art Journal Page

Yesterday H took the kids off for the better part of the day, and I spent some time hanging out with my friend Brittany. We went shopping, had lunch at Olive Garden, and then came back to my house to scribble in our art journals. Because whatever else I may have failed to accomplish in this life so far, I have succeeded in inspiring Brittany to begin this art journaling thing.

I suggested she pick a theme that we could both work from, and she decided on "Lord of the Rings." Why was I not surprised? :)

However, I am not myself so much a LOTR girl, so although I knew there were potentially about a million different directions one could take this, I was stumped for a bit as to what I could do. I kept mentally running over scenes from the movie trying to see if one "spoke" to me enough to make me want to use it as a starting point for journaling. My imagination settled on the scene where Gandalf is trapped at the top of a tower, eventually to be rescued by a friendly eagle. It's one of the scenes that stays with you-- the solitary banished wizard alone on the towering height, mercy and rescue in the form of an unexpected winged visitor. I thought I'd do a loose creative interpretation of the tower. I seemed to remember it was very narrow and spindly, with a cup like open air "room" at the top. I ended up getting some Jack and the Beanstalk and Alice in Wonderland spirit blended in there. That's actually more my speed than this Middle Earth stuff, but don't tell Brittany I said so. :)

The picture of my art journal page above is not the exact one I did yesterday, but rather a reworking of the idea on a new page. Yesterday's background was a bit of a disaster-- I had too many colors going on and it was too runny. But I liked the general idea so I tried it again this morning while coloring with my daughter. I stuck with a more focused color scheme, added some text made of pasted in magazine words and letter squares, and drew a border with a black Sharpie and white gel pen.

The text reads, "At times, we all need rescue." Even wizards, right? Celebrating vulnerability, a la Lord of the Rings and Brene Brown. ;-)