Evolution of a Page

Yay, I"m back, did ya miss me?
The craziest thing happened... I ran out of paint! o.O My watercolours lasted less than a month (altho, in my defence they were only a wee little 8 colour set). Evidently I've already developed a serious addiction to painting, since I went thru some serious withdrawals during the 2 weeks it took me to acquire new paints.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program. A few of my Smash*y friends were asking me how I think of ideas for my pages. It was hard to explain because I don't tend to do whole pages at once. My notebooks/daybooks/smashbooks evolved from journals, which I think are probably different from these same type of books that are made by scrapbookers.  I don't (usually) plan ahead or think of layouts, the pages just kind of develop as I go along.

So, I decided to try & document a page as I went along :) From start to finish, I believe it took about a month.

This page started with a mistake. I was trying to do this cute, little project I had seen on Pinterest with two hands making a heart in the middle. Except my thumb was in the wrong position so I ended up with a triangle >,<

So I went ahead & painted the hand I had already cut out & found a blank page in my Smash*book for it.

"I want to 'seize the day' but usually I settle for surviving it"... is something I had written in an earlier journal entry & it still resonated with me months later when I was flipping thru, so I wrote it here.

"Surviving" was also a mistake (cool things come from accidents!)  I misspelled it so I tore off a piece of coffee stained paper to cover it.. I like it, it emphasizes the word

The girl is inspired by the chapter illustrations from the book Ghostgirl.

I was watching Mona the Vampire, which made me think of the Beetlejuice cartoon I watched when I was younger. I was also looking at The Scribble Project & somebody had drawn cute little worms peeking out of holes. I decided I wanted to draw worms, but cuz I was thinking of  Beetlejuice they became sand worms!  I also added a little sandworm as a divided under a piece of journalling.

In the Ghostgirl illustrations, there is a little crow that keeps her compnay. I thought it would be fun to have the crow being scared by the sandworm. :)

I liked the idea of having things perched on my fingers, so I added another crow & a spider

I received a very nice comment from the other Anne (hehe), one of the lovely & talented ladies over at This Blog Made Possible by Coffee :D

To emphasize how much I loved the comment, I cut out a heart from some scratch paper I had used to practice mixing watercolours to get pink (red + purple + tiny bit of yellow, in case you were curious!)

Under another sandworm divider, I recorded a conversation with my handsome friend regarding the harsh reality of evil zombie kittens o.O beware!! beware!!!

And voila! a finished page :)

10 Things in My Notebook

I am currently trying to think up a fancy sounding name for what my notebooks are. They are not anything like traditional journals.. they're not quite art journals and they don't much resemble other Smash*books I've seen..

What goes into my notebooks can vary a lot, but I will share a few things that are pretty consistently included

I know most people have a page of quote or a few quotes  here and there.. but I have A LOT.  Quoteable quotes that are popular... Quotes from TV shows I'm watching (I am almost always writing or doodling in my notebook while I watch TV)... and quotes from books I'm reading. When I'm reading I tend to dog-ear pages that have quotes I like (so if you borrow a book from me, NEVER mess w/ my dog-earred paged!). If i end up with a lot of them, I do a whole page (or two) of quotes from that book..

 

The Tao of Pooh = Awesomeness

Oodles & oodles of doodles!  My name is Anne & I'm a doodler.

doodle mania!

The two big lists I always keep are the books I've read (this is from having read a book & then spending years trying to remember the name to find it again!) and important things that happen each month.

Here is a list of some of my other lists:

•  A check-list of steps to get my teaching credential
• The word for "blue" in different languages
• To do list (sail away w/ a crew of pirates; take up with a caravan of traveling gypsies; enlist in the french foreign legion..)
• Things that are iredescent 
• Invisibility aids
• Friends & family's birthdays
• Comic book alliterations 
• Places I want to go
• Final consonants which are not usually silent in French

I  have a lot of definitions in my notebooks. I am a word nerd :), so I will include definitions of words that I think are interesting or have a funny etymology. Sometimes I write out definitions of words which are related to how I'm feeling during a particular point in time.

I tend to pilfer items from previous notebooks. When I was younger I mostly did this with stickers- I would peel them off of the page & glue them into my new notebook (yes- I was that hard up for craft supplies!). Sometimes I steal the ribbon marker from a previous journal. Lately I have been doing this a lot with leftover blank pages from previous notebooks.

 I usually to do this for one of two completely opposite reasons. Some notebooks I get attached to and feel sad when I have to move on, like the one I kept right before my Smash*book.. So I included a page from it when I was altering my book because I liked it so..  On the other hand, there are notebooks that I've had so much disdain for that I"ve completely taken them apart for scraps!

page from last notebook glued in :)

letter to my younger self, on pages from an old childhood diary

 

This is something that seems to be really different about my notebooks.  My friends have ALWAYS read & written in  them. My very first notebook was bought as a pair with my sister Beth's & we both wrote in each other's notebooks. When I was a little older my friends & I would use my notebooks to write notes back and forth at school or during church (yes, I know! Very bad!! lol but we did..)

I still have friends that write notes or comments in my notebooks. They write encouraging things or add details to events that I might have forgotten and add comments about pictures.

And no, I don't mean those little packs of do-dads that are sold in scrapbook stores (altho I DO use those too!). Just in case you're not sure, ephemera refers to "printed paper items that were originally meant to be discarded after use". So gift tags, labels, used postage stamps, programs from plays, movie tickets (ok, so I haven't actually been to a movie since The Half Blood Prince.. but when I DID go, I kept the tickets). All of those things usually end up glued in my notebooks. 

 I don't really keep photo albums or scrapbooks, so most of my photos either end up on The Wall  or in my notebooks. 

 Things that are said in text or online tend to get lost & forgotten. So when my friends or family say something funny or cute that I want to remember: I write it down!! I had a friend whose texts were so funny & uplifting that I always saved them and they completely filled up my phone's inbox (I have an ancient, un-smart cell plhone!).  I ended up deleting most of them to free up the space and he passed away less than a week later.... I SO WISH I still had all those messages. So now I write those things down. 

 

 I very rarely do traditional journal entries of: Here's what I did today & how I'm feeling. The main reason  is, when I write things out explicitly-  if I go back and read it later I am thrown right back into that emotional state. Which is good if I want to remember a really great vacation.. not so good if it was a painful time. There are pages that I can not even look at for this reason. Also, I am just not that good at articulating how I"m feeling.  

All the previously mention things, can also be a form of abstract journaling. A lot of my quotes are there because they express more eloquently how I feel. I often draw or paint my feelings too. Photos, ephemera, snippets of conversations are all forms of journaling without having to do a "dear diary" type entry. 

*****

Do you keep any kind of notebook or journal?