I can share with you now part 1 of the “big thing.”

Yesterday
I received my acceptance letter for Lesley University’s Expressive
Therapies program with a specialization in Art Therapy and Mental Health
Counseling. I’ll probably take the 3 year track to complete the program
starting this Fall. How exciting is that?

I
hope to learn how to take my art journaling techniques and turn them
into  more therapeutic (and licensed) practices. I have lots of great
plans and ideas, but those will have to wait for another month or so
before I can share them with you. Needless to say I’m pretty excited.

I’ve
been trying to read more lately and a friend gave me a copy of last
months Shambala Sun*. It had a number of interesting articles in it but
one that I particularly enjoyed was called “What’s Your verdict?” by
Bonnie Friedman. While it was written with the writer in mind it also
applies to the artist.

The
premise of the article is that people tend to diminish their happiness
over success when it is finally achieved. So you achieve success and
allow yourself only a little happiness if any at all. This explains the
dull feeling people sometimes get after achieving success. As an
example, let’s say you have an art journaler you respect, you decide you
want to share work with that person (in their ning group) and you hope
that someday that person takes notice and says something good about
 your work. FInally it happens and for a fleeting moment you feel good
but you discount it by telling yourself, “Eh, it’s just one comment.”
Or, “What she said wasn’t that great.” even though something good
happened you let your inner critic diminish the impact.

Basically,
the idea of the article is a good one about your inner critic and how
to deal with it, which is a very Chapter 2 of JF365 type of thing. You
should check it out.

If
you’ve followed me on twitter or facebook for any amount of time you
know I’m a huge PostSecret.com fan. I’ve been watching the site for
years now. I’ve watched it grow from something small to being a huge
hit. If you aren’t familiar with the site, Frank invites you to send a
postcard containing your secret to him completely anonymously. I’ve seen
a great many secrets that resonate with me, and perhaps that’s why I
continue to go to the site every Monday to see the Sunday secrets. Maybe
it’s because I’ve got a few secrets of my own, or maybe I find it to be
a deeply interesting idea. Whatever it is, you should check out the
site, and maybe send your secret into Frank.

I've been waiting for years to see Frank speak somewhere near me. I've missed him a couple of time in Boston and once in another city nearby. When I saw he was going to be at a college in my city, I jumped on the opportunity. I dragged C along for the ride.

If you get a
chance go see Frank speak, I strongly urge you to go. It’s worth your time to hear his beautiful
words, the words of the people there and the images he shares. Take
someone you love, it could change their life, or yours.

(I was only allowed to take pics for the first 5 minutes of the event, after that no photos were allowed.)

Jane
and I decided to do an arty day where we got together at Jane’s house
and we both brought some materials the other hadn’t ever used. This way
we got to test drive materials in our art journals so we’d get an
informed opinion on them before going out and spending a bunch of money
on them. It also gave us a field trip with our JF365 journals.

I
was able to test out a whole slew of colored pencils and water soluble
colored pencils. I’ll be doing reviews on everything I tested out over
the next few weeks. The pencils I tested out include Koh-i-nor
Progresso, Faber-Castell Polychrome, Derwent Inktense, Derwent Aquatone,
among several others. We had several full hours of chit chat and art
making.

If you have
an arty friend near to you, I definitely suggest scheduling a day of
art material testing and art! It was a ton of fun!

Sometimes finding art around you is as simple as looking. These are in the window at my local coffee shop.