Jens Arty Life

How ironic that Brenda at Bumblebees and Butterflies has used greens and butterflies in her page. Without seeing her page, I've done the same. Just like a butterfly this page went through a metamorphasis. I thought I had finished the page ... I wasn't happy with it but I thought it was done. Then, when I was working on the next page over, water spread from one page to the other and ruined it. So i painted over it with gesso (keeping the butterfly textures and the colours peeking through) and started again. Now I really like this page. So I suppose the disaster of the water from the rain page paid off in the end. Thanks again to Brenda for her blog party. i am really enjoying seeing your journals. Jennidee

My one word for this year is 'Allow'. I have spent a lot of my life anxious and worried because I am so afraid of bad outcomes. Now I am going to allow them to happen (because they happen sometimes whether I worry about them or not, and sometimes they don't happen). I spend a lot of time worrying if my work is good enough to be seen ... good enough to catch people's attention, good enough to sell. That will no longer be my focus. Allowing for myself to be imperfect or fail does not mean that I stop trying. It means that I try for different reasons. I try because I enjoy the process, I enjoy developing skills and getting better, I enjoy seeing improvement and when there is no improvement I just enjoy moving paint and colour around. So I created this page; It's the fifth page in my journal. I had already created the background and I just wrote over it this morning. I'd been keeping the page for something meaningful about starting the year. Thank ...