There are strange forces at work in my world today, everything is just a little bit off.  Everything.

It all started off alright, coffee was fine, walking the dog was uneventful, but the podcast I had chosen was tedious and I switched off halfway through.  I didn’t say the world had ended, just a little off.

Then I moved onto the things I really wanted to do, I watched today’s Creative Bug daily art journal prompt which was nice and vague so I could do almost anything. I formed  an evil plan for what I was going to do for that.

I need to write a Get Messy Art Journal post, which means I have to make some pages and I really should make the pages relevant to the current season of music. I have been enjoying the art prompts this season, but I don’t often add words to my pages, quotes and lyrics don’t do it for me. I know I am weird, but they really don’t.  Sometimes a line in a book or even a song (actually never a song) has caught my imagination and I will jot it down, but not very often.

Handy tip about me, I can’t quote ‘quotes’, like I don’t remember lines from films. Maybe it is a memory thing or maybe I am just rebellious like that. So don’t rely on me in the quote section of your trivia quiz!!

I decided to paint a day/night spread in my Season of Music handmade book, I chose my pages and got to work. As if to follow the theme of the day, one page worked fine (but not amazing) and the other page just looked bad. The paint went muddy and the bright ‘day’ look was far from achieved.

What to do?  What do you do when it all goes down a ditch and you just can’t get back onto the road?  Well, I decided to stay in the ditch for a while, get a cup of tea and think what I could do. Gesso? Magazine cutting? Cut out the page altogether?

I ended up grabbing my acrylic paints and following the Creative Bug prompt which was ‘Start where you are’. Serendipitous methinks, considering I had just created a new ‘start’ albeit a mess!

I ignored the ok page for now and worked into the new page which was now completely separate from it’s neighbor. This is not usually how my journals work, I normally open a spread and work across the whole thing.  Here were two pretty different pages and I am not sure they can be friends.

As I had come this far, I thought I would just work on both pages as separate entities and they could chat about it later. They turned out to be not too bad, so off I skipped to grab my camera to photo them for this lovely post.

Snap snap snap and all done. Oh no, not so fast. When I looked at the pictures inside, there was a  subtle but intrusive shadow over the photos I had not seen when I was taking the photo.

I know, I know, I should have just handed the day over to the washing up and laundry and called it!

Instead I went outside again to a different spot and took the photos again.  No shadow!

So I ended up with half a Get Messy page and half a Creative Bug page.

I did work on some pages for another project and they went swimmingly, so yay for something going right.

I think to be honest I put the pressure on with the Get Messy pages, there is a theme and I am using a book I have made with random paper in it which sometimes is a joy and sometimes I just want white mixed media paper.  The more pressure to do something right, the more chance I will do it wildly wrong. On the other hand, if I just have to do something with less pressure (all self inflicted of course!) it usually turns out and I suppose if the pressure if off and I have to chuck it out or turn the page, I will.  Isn’t this often the case in life though?  Try to take the pressure off and do your thing. If it doesn’t work, try again or move on, you know which to choose.

As soon as I wrote those last paragraphs, I grabbed my sketchbook and gelli plate and quickly slapped on some black and blue paint with a ‘moon’ cut out from paper. I printed opposite an exisiting page which I had flipped upside down and I love it even though I left half the ‘moon’ behind. This was supposed to peel right off, but it decided to stay and give a ‘clouds across the moon effect’.  The whole thing must have taken me no more than five minutes and I ended up with a nice spread and two more backgrounds.

No pressure added.

Aren’t we funny artistic, messy, sensitive human beans?  I clearly do not thrive under pressure!

I hope you have had a non glitchy day.

Happy Thursday x