Doorway of Opportunity - Interactive Art Journaling

1. Introduction: Hello? Hello. Hello. Today I'm going to be exploring doorways of opportunity. Have you ever had a moment when things just seemed to totally align and be as they should be? Maybe it was a moment when you were utterly certain, even if it was about a difficult thing, a feeling that everything was going to be okay. Or maybe you felt at peace and confident in the future. Today's journal prompt. It comes from your story. Is your power free, your feminine voice? 2. Setting Up the Space: After reading that this morning, I have selected a few images. I'm going to be working on some pre painted backgrounds in my journal today. These images right here, I was thinking will be for the second page. So I'm going to set those aside. This image I was thinking might be my doorway, Then I was playing around with this. This is just a leftover scrap, something. I had cut out this figure in here. It was laying on my desktop. I've been playing around with it, Seeing it goes onto my page today. I have this page that I painted and then I have this page different feels to them that's done on purpose. I wanted this page to be a little darker about having some uncertainty, maybe some doubts and fears, and then create a little doorway to this page where we have opportunity. 3. Getting Started: Get started by putting down some fabric. I think this is just a great way to get going. If I jump right into doing some imagery, it might be too much pressure to do something that is significant, meaningful, something like that. Starting off with just some fabric and I'm going to tear it, but I put a little cut in it at the top. Compare that, I'm just going to be using glue stick to put this down on the edge. I'm going to want to put a good amount of it. One of the advantages to using the glue stick is it's not going to seep through your fabric. Now, this is going over the edge of the page. I may trim it back, but I may just leave it like that. This one I'm not sure if I want to do like another edge or maybe I just create just some little blocks in here. Maybe I do like that. I wonder how that will work with this. It's okay to, you know, bring in these elements. I really like that. Just like that. Okay, so this is, I think what I'm gonna use as my doorway. Then I have some of the threads left that I pulled from my fingers are all sticky with glue. I'm wondering if I want to just kind of like put those down, I might put down a little T medium for that. 4. Creating the Doorway: This is looking pretty complete, at least at this point. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to cut the doorway. I have a small cutting mat here and I'm going to put it underneath this page. I'm not cutting all the way through. Get my exacto blade out and cut this doorway out. I also want to score this edge right here so that it folds nice on that line. I'm just going to take the edge of my scissors here and now I'm just tearing through the paper. That's not going to work. It probably would work if I did it on the other side. Let's try that. This glue isn't quite dry yet. Let's put down a sheet of wax paper. Okay, let's find my edges here. I don't want to press too hard because I don't want my scissors to really cut into it too much. But I just want to give it a little score that's going to allow it to fold very easily. Right on that line, I might make this look a little more door, like what do you think? Even if I just add a little door **** there, just makes it look a little bit more door, right? I don't know. I'm just going to stick that down. I may do something more with it later, but for now I think that's just fine. Now, I'm going to work on my page of opportunity. I'm not that crazy about this part. I like the rest of it, but I don't know. For some reason this isn't feeling quite right. I want to go back to this one. This is one that I had cut out something from earlier and that is so striking. And look at that, it fits right in that doorway. Wow, Oh yes, that is it. That's the one. Okay. So what I want to do is I want to make sure that this is not going to shift. I want to get it right in there because it's barely got enough room to fit. All right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to glue down like one edge of it. Double check my alignment. It looks good. Now I can glue the rest of it knowing that it's going to stay a kind thinking about maybe putting some of this fabric on this page as well. We'll kind of help bring the pages together then. I had this quote picked out. A chance to begin again. I think I'm going to cut out the individual words and see how that looks on the page. Now, if I put this on the doorway, when you open the doorway, it'll have this. I like that. Oh, I like that idea. 5. Adding Texture: Next thing that I think I will do on this is maybe add some little patterns and textures to the background. A lot of times I do this when I'm not quite too sure what to do next. This gives me a chance to keep working on my page without having to commit to anything in particular. I love to use stamps for this. Stencils are also another really great option. If I put something down and I'm not quite that happy with it like I put this here, if I'm not using a permanent ink, I can always just wash it away or at least fade some of it into the background a little bit. 6. Detailing on the Doorway: Another area that I wanted to work on was this. Do I have some options that I can do here? One of the things that I could do is put down a little bit of washy tape to bring out the door itself. I also thought it might be interesting if there was some stairs and then maybe put a door **** on it, if I use this, Brad, it is going to show on the backside. So how might I be able to put this on here and not have it do that? I wonder if I can peel up this, I can cover that back up, maybe not quite. But what I could do, since this is just yellow paint, I could take a scrap of paper that down and then paint over it. I've got some two sided tape here that I think will work really well. Give that a moment to dry and then I can adhere this back down on top of it. Now, again, nice little door handle. I could really use a keyhole. I wonder if I put a little bit of some metallic paint behind it. I want to put some hinges on it. But you notice how my metallic paint isn't showing up very well. I need to put down some white paint. The white paint is going to help my metallic show up a lot better. Now, I want to give this some time to dry before I paint on the gold back on there. While I've got my white paint out, I might do something like I could bring out these steps a little bit more. This little white spot right here is where the string, which is from the binding of this journal got in the way of my jelly print. I could turn that into a moon. I kind of want to make the put some more white here, but I want to feather it out so I could just use like a wet paint brush. And I bring back in my gold paint. Now I can paint over that white. Now my moon looks a little too white, so I am going to add a little bit of water color to it. This water color is called moon glow there. Now that looks like it fits in there a little bit better, I think there's one more thing missing on my door. I have some more images here that I might put on my page. See what this would look like. You see how when I laid these down, how I kind of stair stepped them down, I matched this design. We got the stairs here, and now I've got these three pieces of paper going, stepping down like that. Endlessly curious of things that we can do with little leftover scraps. It's really easy for me to overdo it, but I can't. I can't help it to be curious. No, I'm thinking this is enough. I'm thinking this is good. 7. Finishing the Second Page: Okay, let's turn the page and we'll stuck together and work on this. So the first thing that is obvious to me is I either want to trim this fabric or put another piece on this side. One or the other? Maybe both. And then bring another one of these pieces over here too. You notice how I mark my scissors fabric because I have two of the same kind. You don't want to use your scissors that you use for fabric with paper. That's why I have a label on there. Oh, I forgot all about this. I found this little picture frame. I thought I had an idea. Maybe I'd give her a little picture frame. But again, I want to go back to see how that might look. Somewhere around here. There it is. I have some more of this. Magazine scraps that match this. Not exactly, but I thought I might bring this down a little bit more. I can even bring down this yellow. But I'm going to have to put some white down first because the yellow is going to be very transparent. And I want to cover up this green. Just blending that white edge up a little bit, it might show up a little bit when I cover that with yellow. I want to let this dry, but let's see. Well, all of that is drying. I have these other scraps. Remember I was thinking about using them on the previous page. Might do something like that. Going back, checking, seeing how it might look. Do I want those in the picture when the door is open? I think that's fine. I like these being offset too. Maybe even that having them all go in the same direction. It needs something over here too. I wonder if I want to go back to doing some stamps. Adding these repeating elements from the previous page is also going to help to bring these pages together. I also have some of these other collage papers that I created with my jelly plate. See if any of these might go on there. I think I'm going to take my stabilo and give her a little bit more definition. Well, you know what, I need to put my yellow paint down there before we put that stabilo wall on there because that's water soluble and I might make a real mess.