Creative Abundance

In order not to fall into a creative abyss after finishing my 52 Journals project I registered for an online class about Creative Abundance. One of the reasons also was that Lenna had already signed up and it's so much more enjoyable to do these things with a friend. As luck would have it other friends then also decided to take part and I'm looking forward to getting the weekly prompts, suggestions and encouragement every Friday. We're already on our second week as we took the Winter Solstice as our starting point. If you want to join us, there's plenty of time to catch up with those 2 weeks and all you need to do is join The Creative Underground ning group and then find your way to the 52 Weeks of Creative Abundance group there, pay and that's it!

I will share some of what I do for this class here but only those things that are not too personal as I suspect some pages will become. This week's theme was the word Allow and Christi Wich who is our class leader wanted us to think about what creative action we could allow ourselves. She also provided us with instructions to make a tag on the subject. I promptly allowed (pun most definitely intended!) myself to go off on a tangent and although I did indeed make a tag I did it in my own way and mostly using my own imagery. 

I started with an image of one of my favourite statues about which I wrote a dissertation many, many moons ago. You can find this angel and the Holy Mary on the cathedral of Reims, France. I used a large tag, coloured it as shown using watercolours and then cut out the angel and sprayed it with silver metallic spray. I added the "jewels" and stamped the word ALLOW followed by "unrestrained beauty" cut from a magazine. Those words symbolize what my aim is with all my various art forms. The edges of the figure were emphasized with charcoal pencil and the edges of the tag were darkened too. To house the tag I made a pocket in my journal using part of a transparency with inspirational quotes (you can see the tag both in and out of the pocket at the top). The background of the spread is a piece of sparkly tissue paper and on the left hand side I added the dancing figure that is the symbol for the 52 Weeks of Creative Abundance class. I cut it out and used it as a mask and after spraying that page with silver metallic paint too the white figure stands out well. The ALLOW on this page comes from rub-on letters. The final addition was the William Blake quotation that reads: "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower". 

I wanted to have one journal in which to do all my exercises and art for the Creative Abundance class and made a journal, also following an online class. I'm going a bit overboard on them now that we have broadband! You can find this class by Diana Trout here. I painted the journal covers with acrylics and added one of my own photographs (of a decaying sunflower) to the front. 

Our very first assignment for the Creative Abundance class was Stillness and while doing the exercise I took a photograph of our wonderful apple and cinnamon candle, printed it off, added it to my journal, and found the right words for my thoughts about stillness in the same magazine as I used for the Allow tag.