Tuesday, October 6, 2015

9.22.15 – 10.5.15 // Journal Pages



Aloha Borgs,
I’m finally back. These past few weeks I’ve been experiencing that paralyzing kind of anxiety that won’t let you do anything other than binge watch TV shows and YouTube videos on your couch for hours at a time. I think I’ll go into that more in a separate blog post just because I think it’s kind of an important thing for me to talk about.
Anyway, let’s forget about all that and move onto the reason why you’re here, journal page updates! I think my theme for these past two weeks is anxiety and my medium for is watercolor so for brevity I’m going to say this week’s theme is Anxiety & Watercolor.

What I Was…
Watching: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Inside Man (2006)
Listening to: Through the Deep Dark Valley (The Oh Hello’s), ‘Slow Like Honey’ 8-tracks playlist (vitrina), Sad Girls Club Podcast Episode 9
Notes:
·         Through the Deep Dark Valley is one of, if not my favorite album to listen to when I’m creating. I love the way Tyler and Maggie Heath’s voices blend together, the lyrics are astounding and they reference the Narnia series. And the best part…I found it completely randomly like 5 years ago.
·         Also, I’m still loving that 8-tracks playlist.
·         Subscribe to Sad Girls Club Podcast! It’s such a good podcast!



These pages were all over the place. I was inspired to create the abstract or I guess it’s supposed to be an impressionist watercolor flower from watching this tutorial on YouTube. Bear in mind, the flowers in the video are by a professional artist where as my flowers, well they were made by me. Regardless, I did have a really fun time making these flowers. For the quote by Audre Lorde, I found it on Tumblr and it really stood out for me so I thought I would capture it on paper.

There isn’t much writing to talk about on this page but let’s just say the small piece in green is about someone I used to know.


Ah, here comes the full blown anxiety. On the right we have a watercolor portrait, I think it’s of me but I can’t be entirely sure. I created it after I had a minor (very, very minor thank goodness) attack of panic which left me crying for around two to three minutes. After I wiped my tears and regulated my breathing this is what I made. I outlined her with a blue bic pen and used my DIY Travel Watercolor Case for the watercolor bits. I don’t know if you can read the writing at the bottom but she’s saying “when it rains is mother nature happy or sad.” Don’t ask where that came from, I have absolutely no idea. Oh and the speech bubble bit was made with Crayola Washable Markers.

On the right we have an explanation for my attack of panic and general anxiety. I had some papers that I had to turn in for my job and I couldn’t get a hold of those papers and my parents weren’t really listening to me when I was trying to convey my concern about the matter at hand and it just sent me into a spiral of anxiety. I think it’s really interesting that I decided to write in print instead of my regular cursive since print, at least to me, seems to require a lot more control and at this moment in time I didn’t feel in control of anything.


And now we arrive at my first of two all writing pages. As I said in the intro, I was feeling a lot of anxiety and I have a really hard time working through my anxiety. That’s why these pages really focus on the writing.

As for the writing, on the left it’s basically a continuation of my anxiety from the last page. And then the left… to be perfectly frank, I was pissed off. My dad decided to be a misogynist. If you really want to go into detail, just read the page, I’m pretty direct about what happened.



I don’t really know where the idea for this watercolor portrait came from. I’ve decided that this is me in alien form. I’m really impressed at how well this came out. I used microns to outline, and my diy travel watercolor palette in combination with my Reeves Water Colour Pencils for the watercolor portion of the picture. Basically I used a wash of color from my palette then went in with the pencils to add dimension to the face and to color in the iris’. I planned to do a greyscale portrait, but color naturally incorporated itself into the piece and I went with it.

As for the writing, on the left at the top we have more anger about my dad’s misogynistic behavior and at the bottom we have a brief description of my first official day at work which bled over the right hand page. 




More writing pages. On the left is more descriptions of my first day of work and on the right is a little scatterbrained. I was starting to notice and really trying to analyze my anxiety and why I wasn’t able to create anything. Also, it rained.

Huzzah! Another week (or weeks I should say) of journal pages. I’m going to really try to focus more energy and time into the pages I’m currently working on because I’m not loving this spread I posted. I cleared off my work space which is a good sign, but who knows how it’s gonna go. I hope you enjoyed and have an anxiety free week!

Love,

P.S. I just noticed that this spread has a lot of blues in it. I wonder if that was a subconscious decisions or a coincidence...

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