Journal 52 - Week 18, Storage Solutions

Week 18 - Creative Hands

This week, for Journal 52 - Week 18, the prompt was "Creative Hands." (Older pages will be found as a link on the right hand side of the page.) My first thought was to trace my hand and use Zentangle patterns to fill in the hand, but, been there, done that. I was kind of stuck for a moment so I thought I should just do a background first. I have a stack of pre-cut cardstock in the right size that I had printed out to do tangle step-outs on. I grabbed some gesso and put some blobs of that on the paper. Then, I dropped some turquoise/brown/gold acrylic and spread it all in a downward motion. When it dried, I placed a template of my hand over the paper to keep some of that color and added some stamping with white for the flowers and colored them with Koi Watercolor brushes, I added stamped black lines to the right and went around the fingers with a water soluble black pencil that I then used a water brush to move around. I added some white with a gel pen to the flowers and white paint pen on the fingernails. I have a book of Mehndi Designs, by Marty Noble that I used to come up with the designs for the hand, and then journaled with black pen with white accents.

I tend to work on several journals at the same time. If I have paint or ink left from whatever I just put it on, I grab another journal and clean my leftovers on a page. On some days, I may have 4 or 5 wet journals. I thought I would share how I deal with this without covering my whole workspace with drying books:

My bookcase full of wet journals.

Thanks to Sandra Strait for the suggestion to keep a small notebook by my work and jot down what I am doing as I am doing it.