well folks I have been drearily under the weather today. It's been abysmal. I think I've only been awake for a few hours here and there. I wake up, sip some tea or ginger ale and then fall asleep again. I'm feeling slightly coherent for the first time in well, all day.

Would you believe it's taken me most of the day just to get the paragraph above from my head to the computer? Man I'm beat.

In art journaling news: The Ning site is up and it's starting to get really neat. If you are interested in art journaling or journaling in general head over to the group, join and check it out. There are a few free workshops up already. I'm well into working on 2 paid workshops on 2 types of bookbinding as well as making recycled scrap covers for lots of book projects. It's going to be SUPER awesome. There are no other words to describe it but super awesome. Jonathan Manning (AKA @artisticbiker) has set up a really great tutorial on making marbled like paper with spray paint and man is it ever cool. I can't wait to use it as a book cover!  There is now a forum to discuss prompts, stenciling techniques, and a lively discussion about art book vs art journaling.

I'm excited, can you tell?

The other thing I'm excited about are podcasts. (I know how 2007 of me) Ricë Freeman-Zachary has been putting together some of the most wonderful podcasts. She is interviewing some wonderful artists and many of them art journalers! (Squee) She just put one up with Kelly Kilmer and it's divine. You can find it here, but you can also download it off iTunes for free. I just downloaded the entire library of Ricë's podcasts to keep me company during my hellish commute. Additionally if you find her on iTunes you'll find a whole host of other creative types with some good stuff too! (you'll also find an artist I love but whose voice grates on me like nails on a chalk board)

I've not been art journaling as much because I've been fighting off this cold for about 3 days, but I shot a few pics of stuff I had been working on and I made some wrapping paper last night. Every year I make my wrapping paper out of recycled materials. I scrounge kraft paper and newsprint out of boxes at work, flatten it and bring it home. Normally I sit infront of the TV with my sharpies and a few stencils and doodle out a few sheets here and there. We gave up cable this summer and my LCD tv is about to become my monitor (not totally kiding as it's been sitting, unused for close to 3 or 4 months now) I needed some paper fast for my secret santa gift for work. So I banged out a 2 part stencil. First layer-  rays radiating out from the center of a star. Second a big star. I used silver spray paint for the rays. Then I put the star over the center of the rays and hit it with a layer of red, then a spot of silver, then a spatter of red again. I wasn't too perfect about anything as I wanted to let the silver over spray a bit. I call it my bad ass wrapping paper. Perfect for men, women, kids and totally cool, even hipsters drunk on PBR will like it and want to wrap their thrifted gifts with it's awesomeness.

See it here:

 The pic isn't that great, I took it in a dark room, so you'll just have to trust me on it's total awesomeness.

Another thing that I've been experimenting with, something I havne't done in, well ages, since high school is adding photos to my journal. I usually avoid it because I want to avoid the look of, well, a scrap book. Yeah, I said it. I'm no scrapbooker. I don't want people to think that my art journals are scrapbooks with paint. (hangs head) I like scrap books when other people make them, but they aren't MY thing. Does that make sense? Anyway I got this Pogo for a Christmas gift and I'm in love. It's so freaking awesome I'm taking pictures of the dog, the couch, my morning commute (break lights all the way) I'm printing pictures like crazy and I'm loving it. OMG the pogo is the shit. 2×3, business card size, you could attache these thing to anything with the peel and stick stuff on them, ATC, journals, scrap books, The possibilities are endless. So I had to do it.

I did a self portrait when I got to Maine after an interesting and mostly uneventful drive. Then I STUCK it in my travel journal. Yup. It's there. I added a drawing and some gesso and here it is:

And you know what? I love it and it doesn't look like a scrapbook at all to me.

So this part of the post is a reactionary tale don't go further if you aren't in the mood for a good old fashioned rant.

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Designers seem to love the moleskines. They should try the handmade versions for better paper and covers and less hype.

Moleskine Sketchbook Completed from able parris on Vimeo.

Another sketchbook video. This person has them dated and numbered and has loads of videos up on vimeo.

book 8 (26 sept 1990 – 19 dec 1990) from womanonfire on Vimeo.

Tonight my Mom asked me what I'd been doing with the die-cuts I'd made the last time I was here. She's looking for ideas for how she can use the die-cuts to make cards and posters. I sheepishly told her I was using them in my art journal as collage elements. Then, she did something she hasn't really done in a long time she said, "Do you have any pictures up on your blog?"*

I then shared with her some of my art journal pages, things I share with you guys on a regular basis but not so much with my family (well Chris gets to see them all the time.) Growing up my family was mostly always supportive of my art and other activities. They instilled in me, for the most part, that I can do anything. It was more the other people around me that made me fear I could not. People who would ask me, "What are you going to do with an art degree?" "How will you make any money." "Is there money in that?" "Don't make the mistake so and so made, they got a degree in (something not at all related to art) because they loved it, but now they live in that shithole over on such and such road." Seriously if you listen to all the critics out there you'll never get anything done in your life. The critics they eat at your ambition take away your drive to succeed and make you feel awful. There will ALWAYS be someone out there to look at what you're doing and putting it down. There are a lot of negative people out there.

Sometimes you can't help but to listen to them. The critics, once you hear what they have to say it's stuck in your head, on repeat. Like a record scratched on the worst part of a song, doomed to play the same crap over and over. Your stuck until you decide what to do. Some of us need to get angry to get past it. Some sad. Some of us need to hit the bottom to figure it out. Some of us never make it out.

The real question is what do we do once we get past those critics in our head? Those of us who have started our artistic journey and are moving forward what do we do? Do we put others like us down, call their art shit to build ourselves us or do we reach out and pass out our tools and knowledge to bring others around us up and forward with us? We each have a choice to make.

• What choice will you make? 
• (you could use that as a journal prompt)

This is not to say that once you take a walk down the artistic path that you'll never replay those critics, sometimes, even those of us who have had amazing supportive parents, loving supportive partners and crazy artistic friends get bogged down into the crap of critic mindedness. It's maddening to do what you love and to hear that thing in your head say, "This will never amount to anything. You'll never amount to anything. And you'll never make any money."

What I do when I'm feeling like this is I write it down. I get it all out of my system. Then I go fold some paper. Take a walk. Play with my dogs. Cook an amazing meal. Do something not art related. Take a break. Then I go back and obliterate it. Gesso it collage it. ink it. get rid of it. Sometimes I've written it down torn it up and collaged those pieces back into a page. Then gessoed over the top of that. Then painted. The idea was to get rid of it all. get it out of my head and move on.

Here's the thing, you can never move into the positive side of life if you continue to put others down to build yourself up.

The conversation with my Mom really left me with a feeling that, yes, I can do this, this Ning experiment, I can do it. You see I've had questions about it, worried it would fail. Worried it wouldn't take off and questioned what I was doing with it. But that simple 15 minute long conversation with my Mom really made me think, "I can do this." Part of that conversation was about how the internet community is a powerful thing. One person has an idea and another builds on it, until it's this huge thing, like the snowball getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down the mountain. WE just need the right temperature, mix of snow and speed on that snow ball, and soon enough, it will be huge.

And it will. It will be friggin' huge.

*Yes, my family, coworkers and most of my friends know about this blog. I don't hide my internet self from my real life self, because it's all the same.

*Drum roll please*

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For Prize #3  Susan C Brown won with this comment:

For Prize #2 John won with this comment:

I've been tweeting now for months about a ning account where my vision of a place where a variety of people, not just  myself, can teach classes. Its this vision I have. You give a class for free and then you can do a paid class. In my mind it's amazing, this community of artists and crafts people focusing on art journaling. Bringing people up to excel in the art. It's so amazing I can't imagine it even working out. But I know it can. I look at the other Ning groups out there and it makes me say I can do this too.

The Art Journaling Ning site, with it's scaffolding of construction still up, is live. Currently there is but one class up, the junk journaling 101 class. All the videos for that class are in one easy place to find. I'll add a materials list when I get settled this weekend. And you know what, I really like the idea of this. I see it as the future. Will I be able to quit my day job doing this? Not yet but maybe. I'll be putting a lot of work into this site over the next few weeks and weekends. Hopefully in a month or so I'll get my first paid class to go up- a beginners binding course. 

I'll give you this though, I used to think that Typepad was hard to use (before their most recent updates) but Ning is about he most obtuse and annoying setup, really not user friendly at all.  The initial set up is a pain in the rear, however the individual course/ workshop is easy to set up!

I can't wait to get this thing really rolling. Feel free to head over to the Art Journaling Ning and sign up for an account poke around and suggest some classes. Are you interested in teaching some classes? Send me a Ning message and I'll work on setting it up for you!

I did a little experimentation with my Christmas gift last night… Don't ask,it's a long story. Lets just say I get about half my gifts early.

Anyway. The Polaroid Pogo is a sweet travel sized printer that spits out 2×3 inch photos on polaroids Zink paper. I'm not going to pretend to know how the technology works i just think it's cool. It spits out the little photos in less than a minute and right onto sticker paper.

I found the colors to be pretty right on with my monitor and accurate to the original work. The pic was clear and crisp with good color saturation. The size is perfect for my uses. I tend to work smaller anyway so the 2×3 size is just right for me to take pics and add them to my work.

So the next thing was to test the image out with some of the media I use. There was no reaction with gesso, colored pencil or ink pen. It did react with my favorite medium acrylic varnish, any areas touched by the varnish turned a little purple red. The image stayed clear but the color changed. Spray inks did not react in the location of the ink. But when I brushed straight alcohol onto the image it lightened it, a lot, instant fade…. which could be a very interest tool.

I did not consider this as part of my experiment but it ended up being. One of favorite tools in the world- my heat gun when left on an area too long turned it green and obliterated the image. So drying paint around the images will have to be done with extreme caution.

The images are small but not so small that you can't see whats in them. I was able to crop an image, load it to my camera and print it with ease. I have bluetooth on my computer but have yet to figure out how to get my computer to find the little printer. I suspect when I do it will open up a world of possibilities.

I suspect that battery life will be shorter than one might like as I printer 3 pics with it last night and this AM the battery indicator was on yellow, indicating it needed a charge. 

I've found out that radioshack has the Pogo on sale for $29.99 and 80 packs of paper for $9.99. Both are a very good deal, the best I've seen on the pogo just about anywhere. (Thanks Barb of http://craft-therapy.blogspot.com/ for pointing this out) You can save yourselves a lot of money by buying on sale.

The one major drawback that I see to the pogo is it's HUGE power cord, seriously massive, it's about the same size as the cord for my laptop. I suspect they could have made it quite a bit smaller. oh well.

Welcome to the new digital world of Polaroids. Wish they'd made them the same size and shape as the only ones….

The other day Rice Freedman-Zachary put up a tweet that asked "Why do you do this? Why are  you here?"

I do this, the blog, the videos and the art because I love it. Pure and simple, I love it. Art is a passion for me. I've been fortunate enough to be able to create art for as long as I can remember. My parents are crafty creative people who nurtured that in me. I think, sometimes, it was to keep me quiet but still when I had pen and paper in hand it was never stopped. It was the same for my brothers. My parents raised a houseful of artists and they are creative and crafty in their own ways.

And I know, that everyone has not had that during their lives. I know that sometimes parents, friends, family, boyfriends and girlfriends squash your creative impulses, put you down and never bring you up. And if you think for a second that I haven't been there, you are sadly mistaken. I don't talk about it. I worked it out in my journals, made it into art. (If you are here from one of my old blogs you know I used to talk about it, a lot, ad naseum) Is this the place to bemoan the fact that my low self esteem made me choose jerks to date or to tell you my ex was a horses ass?  That any and every creative endeavor was looked upon with scorn? That when I picked up a brush I was put down? That I was told it would never amount to anything and never pay off? (And for that matter, if my ex wants to voice her opinion on here go ahead I know you read my blog.) The thing is this, I can't live in the past. I put that time behind me. I've moved on and I'm not going to use that experience to pull at your heart strings so you read my blog/ buy my books/watch my videos. 

What I have to say is this, if YOU choose to, you can find strength in the horror and the pain and you can create and you can journal. You are worth it. I'm not giving you permission or slapping a label on you; that would be arrogant and patronizing. I'm not interested in starting a church, I'm no deity. I'm just a geeky woman with a pencil, a brush and a journal.

Instead I'm putting techniques and instruction out there. I'm an educator (got a fancy degree that says so too) that believes that someday my students will exceed my skills and I look forward to that day. Yes, you can ask some of my former students that too. I don't want to create co-dependents that always have to learn from me. Part of being an educator is that you learn from the students and that your students move on. In my years of teaching I've learned as much from my students as they have from me. I have spent the last 20 years of my life learning about art and now I'm continuing to share the knowledge I've built. I want each reader and viewer to start with a technique and take it from there. Inspired.

I want everyone who sees my videos to think to themselves, "Damn, I can do this!" Pick up an art journal and start scribbling. My ultimate goal is to bring as many people into art journaling as possible. Why? I think art journaling and journaling is a powerful tool for self actualization, centering  yourself and bringing peace to a creatively chaotic mind. I also think that if give a chance everyone can do this and maybe even better than myself, if they give themselves the chance.

So c'mon what are you waiting for? Pick up an art journal and start scribbling!

This sketchbook is great and Brazilian. Most of the words are in Portuguese but you can make sense of the journal.

sketchbooks – Bipede #1 from Fabio Giolito on Vimeo.

another vimeo sketchbook video.  Excuse the god awful music.

Sketckbook from early 2000's from Cristina Paulos on Vimeo.