I was finally able to shoot a video flip through of my 2013 fake journal. I’ve embedded it here for folks who don’t read the Official International Fake Journal Blog.
My 2013 fake journal represents 19 days of journaling and a few days more of prepainting those backgrounds so it was the piece of creative work I did mostly from March 31 through April 18.
I would love for you to see the video so I’ve embedded it here as well as on the other blog. If you are interested in the contest connected with the video you can read about it in the original post—but do so before Sunday evening because the contest is only lasting 48 hours from the posting of that post.
I had great fun selecting royalty free music from Kevin MacLeod’s incompetech.com. If you aren’t familiar with his site be sure to visit it and look around.
At the end of May I’m going to have some photos taken of the pages of this journal. I should be able to post some detail shots of various elements of the journal. All that, and more about my character for 2013, will happen over on the Official International Fake Journal Blog. I hope you’ll stop by and check it out now and then.
Also, in a couple days when I’ve compiled it, I’ll have a list of links to various other artists who have done an end-of-project write up about their participation in IFJM 2013. They share some thoughts about how the project went for them. (Right now on that blog there is a list of participants in the right-hand column so you can go visit their work.)
This is the craziest thing I’ve ever tried to do during all my years of fake journaling—the tightest deadlines, the most intense production, and a character who is only superficially similar to me—it’s that nearness that almost made my head explode. But it’s also a journal from which I’ve taken a lot of energy and joy back to my regular journal. It has planted new seeds of thought in my mind and made me think anew about something so indelibly a part of me. It was worth all the almost sleepless nights.
BRAVO! SO much to absorb, but some favorites right off:
– the spread where the dog and the man seem to have the same hooded eyes
– beautiful pears
– loving the nurse and those colors!
You were able to use saturated colors with a lot of hue variation, and still had a very unified result— not easy!
After all this painting as your character do you feel ” looser” and different?
This is wonderful. I love it! (But I’m sure that only Roz could have painted those birds.)
I think this is some of “your” most interesting work!
Ellen, thanks so much, I’m glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for saying which ones you liked best because the dog with the hooded eyes and man, if it’s the green dog, was my least favorite spread, though that sketch of the man was probably my favorite—and it was the FIRST sketch I did when I started sketching pieces for the book to use as “collage” but it didn’t get used until that far in.
And it’s funny because the nurse isn’t a nurse—but because I didn’t paint the rest of her hair she totally gives me the nurse vibe too!!
Who knew I loved pink so much, huh? Now I can’t stop using pink.
After the journal I didn’t feel looser, but I did feel different. There’s been a shift in how I think about a lot of things. I’ve got notes written but with all the disruption going on here I haven’t had time to put it all into a coherent note for my wrap up on the other blog. I hope to do that next week. Thanks for the feedback.
Thank you Nancy. It’s funny the games I had to play to get out of my head space. The page of lots of small head drawings done of the small birds on sumi paper and stuck down were actually the hardest and in some ways the easiest. I was using a new brush pen which contains watercolor and going for smooth lines. And I did about 20 sketches of the little guys (birds in the aviary at the new living facility the folks have moved to) and I THREW THE REST OUT (which you know is not easy for me to do as I like to keep everything and everything in chronological order—EEEEK). The page of “red” finches I think is Roz-like over something else, but it is exactly where I’ve been going in my sketches in my regular journals when I’m sketching out—looser and going around stuff with that acrylic marker.
I’m glad you enjoyed the book.
Thank you Carol. It was certainly the most difficult and as I was just telling a friend in response to an email, it was difficult to do it with everything else going on, but perhaps that was the only way I could have got this result. And a clear idea of what I want to be doing in general. Thanks.
Nancy, I forgot to say that page spread 7 with the row of finches is definitely the most me in the book. I did them quickly and even “gave up” on the brown one and wrote notes as I was sketching (these get obscured later). But it’s also very like what I used to do when I was younger, as far as the rest of the page goes. So in a way it is very odd for me to look at that page.
It’s one that I’m going to have photographed so that I can show a detail of the painting because there are some cool things happening with the gouache.
And it was the first spread on which the DaVinci gouache I was using really stopped fighting me (or vice versa) and doing what I wanted so I knew I could get through the entire book—with the paper in the book aided by the acrylic gelli printing. The previous spread with Sophia Grace (the lovely little French Bulldog I’m in love with) was more frustrating (with the gouache) because I was still adjusting to the greater tackiness of the DaVinci (I ruined at least one brush) and I was working on Sumi paper which had a felt like texture.
But spread 7 was the “hump” spread for me. I knew it would be doable. I’m glad it happened that early.
Roz, wow, thanks for sharing your fake journal with the video. I enjoyed seeing the juxtapositions of faces (human and canine).
Roz – As I said in my IFJM contest entry email this morning, your journal is a joy!
And just ignore my bone-headed request for a materials list, in the same email. I hopped on over to the IFJM blog this morning AFTER I sent the email (Doh!) and there it all was, laid out in detailed posts like a smorgasbord.
Thanks for sharing your creative processes and techniques so generously.
Kristin, thank you for letting me know you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching.
KerowynA, thank you for your kind comments. I’m glad you enjoy it. I didn’t get over here until I’d finished my other emails so I’ve already sent you a materials links list to the key posts. It was a kind of smorgasbord come to think of it.
I hope you give the gelli arts plate a try. I had the most fun with it. I’ll keep using up the DaVinci gouache, but I don’t recommend it for non-gouache users who’ve never had gouache—better to start with a better brand that won’t be frustrating.
Anyway, have fun in your experiments! Thanks for watching.
Roz, with all respect, it IS so you. It’s simply impossible for you to do a truly “fake” journal. Remember what your father-in-law said . . . .
Liz, I don’t know. This is a lively point of discussion among my art friends right now. I think it is possible, and I think this is definitely not me. And I’m fond of it because it skates so close to me that I can reach out and touch the character as she passes, but know that she isn’t me. And yet she does some things that were so me in the past (as far as how she uses her page and writes unrelated stuff—that’s very me from college). Perhaps this is a totally new direction I will go in for everything now.
As to what CR said, I’m assuming you’re referring to his comment about nothing I say ever being mistaken for being random? That kind of proves my point because this whole journal was created in a random fashion, though others argue that the randomness happened within a circle of clearly defined, non-random “rules” generated by the character, who, like all of us, has some key constants of response in her life.
Can we ever truly escape our total selves? Fake busters count on the art forgers not being able to do so in order to identify what’s different and therefore fake so maybe no one can ever do a truly fake journal.
But then you can rip yourself so out of your normal context without supports and force yourself to inhabit the mind of someone else who lives by a different set of rules or criteria—I know that, because it’s what I did for 19 days. I’ve had oral surgery that’s been more pleasant than most of it; but then as I indicated there was a glimmer there, a hint of a possibility that some difference might be healthy for me. And that’s where the next exploration happens.