Insight

Lots of new projects are on the horizon for 2016. My greedy artist soul is always taking on more than I could ever hope to achieve in one lifetime but that never seems to stop me. In the end things sort themselves out as those projects I continue with, are the ones I feel most deeply about and fall in love with. You will hear all about them all in due course and here is the first one. Novel Approach is a paid for online class run by Tammy Garcia. There will be a follow up class later in 2016 called Groovy Grunge. It's all about art journalling, surprise, surprise. In fact all the projects are geared towards that. This particular one calls for us to alter a book. As soon as I heard that I thought of my much treasured General Ledger.

I bought this beauty some years ago in a second-hand book store because it was irresistible! Just look at those gorgeous marbled pages. The side view is totally stunning!

I had to have it just for that. Isn't it amazing how much attention was paid to a ledger filled with columns and lines to keep the accounts up to date. The ledger was never used so no one got the pleasure of writing in it till it reached my hands.

When you open it up what you see is shown beneath. More fantastic marbling and a beautiful woven bookbinding. It's beyond yummy. So when Tammy mentioned finding an altered book I grabbed this from the shelves.

There is only one disadvantage to this ledger. It is HUGE. When opened to a double spread it's sized 16.5 x 22.1/4" or if you live in metric land: 42 x 57 cm. It also weighs a ton! I can barely lift it and it's hard to manipulated on my worktable. So why am I going ahead and using this? Because I love it and I can't wait to start filling the pages with art.

The first spread is already done and you can see it at the top of the post above. It's a vision board (quite an in thing apparently as it was mentioned in an article in one of the Sunday papers this week with wonderful synchronicity). A lot of the images are meaningful to me and I'm not going into detail about those messages here, but I'm there in person too.  It also shows lots of things I'm mad about: textures, colours, vintage, fabric, beads,trees, sunshine,  you name it and it's there. That's the advantage of such a large surface! But I also ordered the largest size of Golden Fluid Matte Medium because the disadvantage is that it eats up a lot of materials!

I have prepped the ledger by taking out pages to make room for all the paints and collage, and I glued pages together to make them more sturdy. So I'm all set to go! I won't just be using the ledger for these classes but probably for other projects in 2016 too. Hopefully it will be bulging this time next year. I'm using an elastic belt with a lovely buckle (saved from the 80s, I knew it would be useful one day!) as a closure.