EPHEMERA: IT COMES AND IT GOES

Every time my creative journey heads down a new fork in the road, the same thing happens. It starts with one tiny little change, like sorting my "rainbow" of painted papers by color, and storing it in these plastic crates, which used to hold all of my yarn. 

 But, in order to make room for those crates on your shelves, you have to consolidate something else.

And, in order to make room for the new tools and supplies you never knew you needed before, then you have to purge something else.  Before you know it, you've reworked every single shelf, drawer and cabinet in the room!

But that's a good thing, isn't it? Because it helps you to focus on what is truly useful and makes you really, really happy, and to eliminate that which is just taking up space.

When I took my very first art class on-line, I had an instructor who was mad for scrapbook paper and ephemera.

Ephemera

In fact, I think art journaling probably came into being when a bunch of bored scrapbookers started looking around and thinking "Yikes, now what do I do with all this stuff?" Well, I had never done scrapbooking, so I had to run out and buy a bunch of that stuff for my class! My second instructor used those things occasionally, but was more into drawing and watercolors, and I discovered I enjoyed those a lot more. So I added those supplies. Each successive teacher led me a little further down the path toward my own true style, but it wasn't until this last major purge that I finally faced up to the fact that I freakin' hate scrapbook paper and ephemera, so out it went at last! Which gave me a really great space for storing all my not-yet-painted papers...

and my hand-carved stamps, which I hope to be doing a lot more of!

So, for those of you who were wondering just what I am planning to do with that rainbow of papers I painted, first on the list is this...

completing that toucan, the second project from my Paper Painting Collage workshop with Elizabeth St. Hilaire. I consider both this and the apple to be my practice projects, and probably the last ones I'll ever do on canvas, since, believe me, the last thing we need in this house is any more stuff to hang on the walls!

My instructor was right. You NEVER have enough paper!

Once this fellow is finished, I plan to jump back in to my art journals, to see where these new techniques might lead me.

I'm especially anxious to get back to my travel journal -- finish up with Sudan, and get to work on Barcelona. Because, seriously, if ever there was a city just crying out to be illustrated with a million tiny bits of colorful paper...

it would have to be Barcelona, would it not?