Junk Journal Jotting

100 Day Project Day 34

My favourite kind of Scottish weather is horizontal rain while the sun shines. The contradictions and improbability light up my soul. We had some today, right on the back of everyone celebrating the wheel turning, and the arrival of spring. I’m celebrating the continued attempt at winter, given the fact we have fucked the climate, and at the moment no-one is fucking the climate more than the people dropping bombs on Palestinians.

It doesn’t go away.

I spent some time today in my sketchbooks, which is good because I went from a complete ban on buying new ones to accumulating several more, and another one is on order. In my defense, some of the new ones were gifts. I absolutely can handle art supplies as gifts 🙂

One of the spreads that I made today looks like nothing at all. A mess. Rubbish. It’s so unIntsgrammable that I seriously considered posting it there*. It’s a great spread, though. In amongst all the scribbles and the marks there are discoveries that wouldn’t have been made without making the mess.

I came across a piece of wisdom today that stuck in my head, even though the where of the piece of wisdom did not stick anywhere, sorry. If I remember I will add it in.

The piece of wisdom went something like this… if you hate a piece of art you made, try to find three things about it you like. I’m going to put that in my tool bag and carry that with me.

I didn’t go back to my painting from yesterday, but I did revisit the reference, and painted it again inmy junk journal. I started out with the dark background, that was painted yesterday from the leftover paint on my palette.

With the dark background as my starting point, I started with my lightest light and picked out the highlights. I was not focused on creating a likeness, I was focused on seeing shapes and values, and because it is a junk journal page on a pice of upcycled junk mail, there is no preciousness or perfectionism about the outcome.

I worked back towards the dark of the caput mortuum in stages, just mixing a bit more into the buff titanium and looking for the places with that value. Only at the end did I bring a smidgeon of mars black in for the darkest darks.

It was a fun exercise, and another page filled of my handmade junk journal.

*Instagram went down again last night, and locked a lot of people out of their accounts. When it happened to me, the onscreen message suggested someone else had my account, and I thought I had been hacked. I hadn’t, but the momentary feeling that I had reminded me that all of these platforms can take your content away from you in a second, and so I’m definitely landing in the create-your-content-where-you-own-it camp.

I’m eternally grateful to the wee puckle of people who read, thank you.

Til the morn,

Suzanne