Day 27: A new passion

Twenty-seven posts down and three to go. For this month anyway. I do love writing here. And I do love sleeping more than 5 hours a night. Conflict! I just never have enough time for everything.

I have taken some time the past few months though to do something new. I'm not really an artist, but I have over the years dabbled in a few different visual art genres: oil painting, watercolors, drawing (I'm terrible at drawing). I even had a little jewelry business for a while. I'm not good at any of it. In fact, I may not even reach the mediocre line on the chart, but I like doing it -- whatever "it" is at the time.

Most recently it's been art journaling, which means I can combine the art (using the broadest definition of the word) and writing. I enjoy the flexibility of it. The lack of rules. It's meditative and yet messy. It's something Coraline and I can do together, each at our own level, on opposite sides of the dining room table, although it's hard to tell sometimes which one of us is 5. Also, I love buying art supplies and hoarding them, so back when I could afford to do that, I did. And now I've been opening boxes I packed up 7 years ago and finding treasures I can use now. Bonus!

I've been reading a new blog lately, The Badass Widow, and she had the courage to post some of the mandalas she's been drawing in a class she's taking. So I thought, What the hell. I'm going to post my little art journal pages some night when I don't feel like writing a lot. Like tonight.

So here they are. Don't judge! I'm neither an artist nor a photographer. I'm just a writer who sometimes likes to do something a little different with words and paper and shit.

I started out with these altered playing cards. I thought I was on to something new. Turned out it was already a thing. Oh well. 

"She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them." ~~ Zora Neale Hurston

"There comes a time when you have to choose between turning a page and closing the book." ~~ Author unknown (to me)

The journaling I obscured on this one. Not everything is meant to be read.

Coraline and I collaborated on this one.