I started an art journal! And it is totally out of my comfort zone right now. It is not easy for me to give up control on a page. I like to plan my layouts, figure out where every thing is going to go, including any stenciling or ink or paint. I am not one to be comfortable with just putting paint, or basically anything, down on a page and getting messy without a plan. But I definitely wanted to try it. I needed to get some of my feelings out, creatively. This month's Mini Layout challenge really sparked me to really want to try this, as it is to focus on change. Wow, that is my whole life right now. There is so much change with my DH gone, so much that will spark a sadness in me. An isolated song lyric that had no significance to me before will now hit me hard when I hear it. This particular lyric from the song "Hard Habit to Break" by Chicago has been floating around in my head for months. It speaks so much truth as to what my life is like now. Susan's challenge to do a mini page about change gave me this whole idea of doing art journaling to get these feeling all out, in a creative way.

So here is my first attempt at art journaling. For this page I played with texture pastes, some stencils, a palette knife, and a small jar of a sequin mix meant for a shaker. I wanted my lyrics in white on a black page, and really didn't know how I was going to do that, but decided to just print them on cardstock and cut them out in pieces. I told myself it's an art journal page… let loose… anything goes. I got more comfortable with it, and definitley will be doing more pages.