The end of Book 2...

I was going through older magazines the other night and tossing the ones that I will never use, tearing out single articles and generally doing a bit of streamlining.  I don't generally read Art Journaling, as I seem to go my own way and I am not a big sharer of pages full of writing about my internal thoughts and workings, and that is the trend now it seems.

I bought this issue, Autumn 2012, because of an article about Lynne Perrella,  I generally like her work, she has a style of her own and uses photos in ways I like.  In any case, she was quoted as saying that she worked on a page off and on until she thought it was done.  Each page should be finished, not a rough draft.  I like that ethic.

I have declared Book 2 done, much as I finally did with Book 1.  There is nothing more that I want to do to the pages, and I have not given up on any of them.  I kept at it until the page felt "right" to me.  Having only about 24 page spreads in the book let me get to that place and I am REALLY happy with having learned that.  Nothing was more annoying to me than having a collection of "journals" with 5 to 10 pages done and a huge number of blank pages sitting around but I never feel right picking them up and starting again! Maybe now I will unbind them and go smaller.  Binding these things into smaller collections is like being born again!!!

The other thing that I am learning in this process is to let a page just sit, not to force myself to stick on a page until it is done but to let some pages rest until I can see them with clearer eyes and then go after them again. That mind set has let me go back to a page many times until I felt I had solved it to the best of my ability. Some went through more iterations than I would have thought possible for a single page before getting somewhere.  For me "somewhere" is that I learned what I could and it looks finished and not overworked.

This particular page has been SO many things.  At one point it was totally covered by a map of New Mexico.. Don't even ASK what I was thinking because I don't know.  I peeled a lot of it off, left some, painted parts blue, etc etc etc.

Now it is this page:

I am learning about gel medium transfers as a different way to get my photos into the pages and I like the results.  This paper is heavily textured so the transfer is a bit sketchy, but I liked the overall effect and decided I was going to call it finished. (As an indication, this is the second time I tried the transfer.  The first time only the baby looked right so I took off the other people and gessoed over the place where they were and tried again.  The baby is from the first transfer, the other two are from attempt 2. This time Mom didn't do perfectly, but the problem is the texture in the paper and though a hammer might help I decided that it is ok as is without resorting to banging on pages!)  This page is opposite the transfer page, 

Yes, I have noticed my recent obsession with circles, this book is full of them, and I am not sure where that appeared from but there it is, and on a lot of pages I like them.  This one, not so sure.

This page was sitting there feeling not so great, and the black tape across the top with some bubbles across it did, for me, the trick of anchoring the page and breaking up that huge expanse of color with nothing else going on.....  

and the covers, front and back.

I haven't shown all the pages, but most of them, and it is time for me to move on.  My current thought is that when all 4 of these books are done I may bind them all back together as 4 folios of a single book.  This one was started in September of 2014, so I may have all 4 ready to go before the end of 2015.  I am trying to be more organized about the next one.  Let's see how that works out. I mean by that more organized in documenting what I have done.  I still can't/won't work by starting on page 1 and moving through the book.  I jump around based on what I want to work on. My word for the year was DO!  maybe it should have been ITERATE!

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