Art Journal: Pretty Soon

I realized this afternoon that I only have one month left with Creamie at home with me all day.  She is going to start preschool this fall (I get to buy school supplies!) and then every fall for the rest of her life at home she’ll start scho0ol.  I’m not sad about it, life is what it is.  She is more than ready to start school.  She talks about it all day everyday, and she can already recognize a handful of letters.  She has been talking about going to school this fall since before she turned two.  She’s ready.

I want to really enjoy this last month  of having her here at home with me all the time.  Because soon this time together will change.  I’m not sad, I know she is going to grow up and there is nothing I can do to change it, or stop it.  I am so excited for her to move forward, and learn new things and expand her little mind.  But as much as we are both looking forward to the new experiences, I don’t want to miss a single part of the end of this one.

We have been taking digital photos for a long time.  Our entire married life. (Though our wedding photos are all film.)  And of those hundreds and thousands of photos stored on our computer (and backed up on a hard drive in the safe) I could count on one hand the number of photos we have actually printed out.  Having my Instax camera has been great.  I snap a picture, and it is done, printed, finished, ready to glue onto something.  I don’t feel the need to edit, crop, increase saturation, fix lighting, whatever.  I just capture the moment or the view and then use it.  I’ve also been taking closeup photos of each one to save on the computer too.  I kind of freak out about all the things in my life that aren’t saved and backed up and documented in 2 or 3 or 4 different spots, you know, just in case.

A long time ago my dad gave me a box of these magnetic poetry words.  Only, I’m not a poet and I hate having things stuck to my fridge.  But I’ve been using them in my art journals and I love them.  These didn’t make it onto this page, but I still think they are sweet. (This is an instagram I took in the middle of my artsy time today.)

So someone asked me the other day what is the difference between a scrapbook page and an art journal page.  For some people, they are the same.  I have about 6 different art journals, all with different papers and pages and purposes.  This particular book is more scrapbooky than the others.  When I made this book I picked out about 75 of my favorite scrapbook papers from my stash and took them to OfficeMax to be bound together with chipboard covers.  When I start working on a page I just look for a paper that stands out to me.  This book isn’t in any kind of order.  I just work on the page I think looks appealing that day, no matter what is the on the pages around it.  And I don’t know if I’ll use every single page or not.  That doesn’t really matter as much.  I’m just writing down what I’m thinking about, and pulling everything out of my boxes of scraps that I think might look good on there.  My scrapbook pages I’ve made ( I have hundreds and hundreds of them) are more about documenting events.  I have a LOT more pictures, and very little writing .  And they are all in plastic pages in binders, which means there is very little on those pages besides flat paper, nothing that would add much bulk to them.  Anyway, I feel a lot more free to do whatever I want in my art journals, and I’m glad I have so many different kinds.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll work on a different kind, who knows.  Hope your Thursday is wonderful.