Things that make me truly happy by Sharon

When it comes right down to it there are a million and one things that make me truly happy. Most of them are little things like the first time I uncap a new tube of paint or smell fresh hot cinnamon doughnuts. I love watching fireworks and fireflies. 
 love new places and revisiting old favourites. I'm really happy on a quiet stretch of beach amongst the seaweed or the deep green depths of a rainforest.  

So what on earth should I choose for this journal?  It's not easy to choose just one thing. 

Eventually I decided that it is a process not a thing that makes me happy and content. It is the process of learning. 

I realised that I love to understand what is going on around me. The process of seeing something and going back home to research further. To google, to read and digest so that next time, even if I don't remember the specifics, I will understand the generalities of what I'm seeing. 

My post is headed observation and understanding. I'm have layered up a loose seascape using inktense blocks then added a couple of stamps to represent memories of places and things I have discovered. Then I used images and some text from a 100 year old text book that I bought from a monastic town I stayed at several years ago. 

Here is the combination of childlike wonder with the more logical and science based adult looking at the world through the eyes of an artist. Hope you like it. 

Jan works in Grimoire

This was such a lovely journal to receive and I chose Angel Blessings for my dream catcher!! I felt i needed it at the time (arm broke an' all!) So thank you very much Monica.

I also mostly did this with the left hand so it was kept fairly simple. A friend gave me a helpful book and so I chose to interpret that and just copied the principles.

The shroud covering the journal was lovely. Unfortunately I was not able at the time to sew, however I signed it and added a few stamps.

It was a pleasure to work in this inspiring journal. 

Jan has Laughter in Spite of Pain

Well this was truly a pertinent time to have this journal! Having fallen off my bike and broken my right arm! Anyway! All good and getting on the mend now. My pages in the journal were done mostly with the left hand and the KISS principle. But I enjoyed doing them and reading the other entries in the journal.

I got a neat Seth Apter stencil and that was great to work with.

I added a glow in the dark sheep to the other great and colourful things on the spine!! You can see her at the top of this page. A journal to treasure.!

The Art of Transformation Comes to WA

I have journeyed further than I possibly should have this time.  Have I strayed off track you ask but to my mind my entry fits the bill well.  My spread is called "Ancestor Guardians". It is based on my journey to Borneo a few years ago. This small island has affected me deeply. I was so impressed with the reverence the people have for nature and the way art is deeply embedded into their culture.

Ancestor guardians combines two of my photos: the tree of life of the orang ulu or mountain people and the two guardian figurines that protect the longhouses of the Iban. These wooden effigies -one male and the other female stand at the entrance to the grounds surrounding the longhouse and protect the inhabitants. Each one is created when the long houses are built and are often dressed in clothes but left out in the weather to rot in the elements until they are barely recognisable.

But how does this fit into the Art of Transformation?   The transformation that I looked at was that of former  head hunters into a deeply religious people who revere the plants and animals around them and their strongly superstitious beliefs regarding their ancestors and evil spirits. This is easily discernible by looking at their wooden statues and the tattoos on the elders of the tribes.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this slightly off track entry...Sharon

The Music is You

This page is based on the many happy camping trips in have this year.  When I began to think about music types and what would I put in the journal that represented me, I stumbled for a while. Then I realised that since the kids have left home, live music or recorded music hasn't featured strongly in my life and I missed it.

But then I realised that I am surrounded by music every day, that of the bush.  Every morning I hear the morning chorus and each night I can hear the birds singing in the wetland behind our house.  

then I found an article in the Smithsonian about some studies from Cornell University  that piqued my interest.

Apparently there are a lot of simarlarities between human and bird song.  Some birds choose to sing in tune!  they are even fussy about what scale type they sing in. 

Anyway it just seemed like something interesting to put in the background. There isn't a lot of it visible in the finished piece. It's hidden, just like the birds that sing such wonderful songs, hidden from casual view but definitely there if you bother to look with care. 

There is also a added extra. I did a quick extra spread in a spot everyone was avoiding. There was an empty spread where one signature finished and there is a gap between the start of the next signature. It screamed out for a simple entry.  Rhapsody in Blue has long been one of my favourite pieces of music. So here is a little entry inspired by that piece of music and the colours of the ocean over Summe r

Oriental by Sharon

When I was a child, Nanna used to save up very hard and go on cruises.  She saw the orient from the huge cruise liners of the 60's and 70's. It was a big thing in our family. We would drive her to Fremantle to embark on her journeys.  We threw streamers and watched as she sailed away.  When she returned we would all gather again to hear of her escapades and watch as she unpacked her suitcase. Out of that case came all manner of wonders.  There would be clothes for captains dinners and shift dresses for day tripping and souvenirs form exotic lands.

I still have many of those treasures.  International dolls, kimonos from Japan
and most treasured of all, one of her travel diaries.  It's filled with tales of the food she ate and some of the folk tales from the lands she visited.  

My page is dedicated to her amazing life of travels and the huge amount of love and creativity she showered on me. 

The man with the hollow tooth: Mon's entry in Nicole's "Out of the Box"

Nicole's journal was so freeing and "out of the box" for me that it took me a while to find what I'd be doing as my entry. Normally when working to a theme I try to push the boundaries and think outside the box.

With the theme of "Out of the box" it was more the opposite for me: a working "into a box" if that makes any sense.

I based my entry on a story my Grandpa used to tell me when I was little. It is one of those never ending  stories that loop. The sparse reference i could find on the net implied it was a Swiss story as it was apparently not known in Germany. The story goes like this (translated from Swissgerman:)

There once was a man who had a hollow tooth,
inside the tooth was a little box,
inside the little box was a letter,
inside the letter was written:
There once was a man who had a hollow tooth,
inside the tooth was a little box,
inside the little box was a letter,
inside the letter was written:
etc. etc.  you get the idea.

Somehow as a kid I could not get enough of this story and I must have driven my ever patient Grandpa nuts with urging him to go on and on and on.
In my mind I could see it clearly; the man with the hollow tooth who's tooth housed increasingly smaller versions of himself and at the same time I was still curious as to what the next "little box" might contain. But of course it always was another letter with the same story in the box but that did not dim my fascination with it.

It was a bit like holding both mirrored bathroom cabinet doors to my face and seeing an infinite and ever smaller version of myself. Or like going for a walk not knowing what the next bend in the path might reveal.

My entry in Nicole's "journal" (it is a box not a journal) became itself a little box as this is a hollow double layer about 1cm thick. Inside the hollow tooth sits a little box with a wee letter stuck in it and with a wee drop of sealing wax which landed partially on my finger. I have a blister to prove it. (Note to self: When working with sealing wax on tiny areas it is safer to use a toothpick or similar to hold down the piece.)

On the back I wrote the story as many times as would fit onto the paper and then used an aqua brush to paint a man's face with water and the soluble ink from my writing pen as the only paint.

I enjoyed working in this box of a journal and it brought back many memories from my childhood.
xoxo