I am playing with found "poetry"

I am really fond of words, but I have found it hard to include words in my journal pages. As part of 2015 I am trying to incorporate them in a variety of ways.  The page here contains words from a single page of Jane Eyre.   I have always thought about this book as containing some really amazing prose, but I have also been interested in how poetic a lot of it is.  The words here are not particularly poetic, but they came just as the painting and scratching on the journal page revealed itself to be a dog.. So they called it out of the page and here it is.....

I keep thinking this is done

and then something else catches my eye and I am back at it.  Not like me much to get this close to a stopping point and not stop.  In any case, I got to playing with a photo of this page on my tablet in a paint program.

When I was through translating what I did on the tablet to the page it looked much different from what I was seeing on the tablet, and I am not sure I like it as much, but I guess that is why I am still playing with it.

Now it looks like this... next week, who knows..

Happy 2015

I have never been a huge fan of  resolutions, but along the way to adulthood I encountered the idea of a "word" and the idea that a word can change your focus.  I have tried different words over the years.

The last I remember well was "process" which was supposed to make me enjoy the path to making things rather than focusing only on the finished product.  It worked with knitting.  Hand me needles and yarn and I knit.  I care not WHAT  I  knit, I only care that I knit. I make things that I can later give away because I am usually not emotionally attached to them once they are done, though I love them while I am making them.

This year I have been thinking about it for a while, and this is the word.

I have been frustrated with myself lately because everything that I want to try/do requires setting something up (printing press), making something first to use in the process (gelliplate), organizing something so I can look at it differently (work on the archive of letters etc. I got from my father), .... the list is endless and it goes on.

SO  this year I am focusing on the word DO.  Will the elves help? I doubt it somehow but they are exemplars, I wanted to hang them up but they were old and faded so I didn't.  Then I colored on them and there they are. and of course there is the Yoda quote, that is never far away....

"DO .... or do not. There is no try"

Got a word for the year that you are interested in?

and then there is knitting

I have been playing with this guy.  He is done now ...  I made a few changes, I changed the colors, obviously, and did a bit of improvising here and there.   Wings are a bit bigger and I had that lovely color and didn't want to waste it.  Nothing sewn on like beads or anything, the eyes are double French knots.

The other thing I do every year at this time

Is get crazy looking at what I have done versus what I have wanted to do and all things like that.  This year coming, 2015, I am going to try to be more organized in my work and work more.  I am right now going through the bags of things that collage people invariably collect.  I have a bag of "paper" stuff, a bag of "texture things" to use in Gelliplate printing, a bag of "game pieces and parts" to use in jewelry maybe?  Who knows.

Meanwhile, I have actually been creating some pages in old gelliplate print journal number 2.

This is a two page spread, so they are next to each other.

I do this every year at this time

http://www.cafepress.com/spanishwaterdogclub.1442938064

I make a calendar from photos submitted by members of the Spanish Water Dog Assoc. of America.  Members send photos of their dogs and I create 12 pages and a cover and the club gets money to use for Rescue.  I spent the last two days immersed in photos of dogs in various activities and poses and am finally done.  It is GREAT when I can load it go the site and it is for sale.  Since I make the calendar I do have the liberty to assign certain dogs to certain months.  This is November:

and this is the kind of life some of these guys live.  Pacho surfs and hangs out at the Grand Canyon and the beach with his buddies.  Sienna and Tinta are not allowed to look at the calendar lest they drool on it in envy

I started book number 2 in this series,

and I am back at the very beginning, but this is maybe done, or maybe not.  The right side is not done, but the left may be..

I have always struggled with words.  I like words, I like letters printed with wooden type in funny orientations so you are not sure what they are.  There was a time when I had set myself a goal to make found poetry out of headlines in the NY Times.  I had to make the poetry from the same day, so only headlines from today would make the poetry of today.  I did it for a while, but I didn't like what I was doing as the backgrounds (washy watercolor with no real focus) so I finally dropped it to see if I could resurrect it later on.

Now I tear out headlines that appeal to me and just stuff them in a (now pretty fat) envelope.  This was the first time I used anything from the envelope. We'll see what happens next.