Being Brave – A journal page healing technique.

January 25, 2013 · by · in , , ,

 

 

Hello my amigos. It’s been a while! Let me summarise the past couple of weeks in short; We moved to an awesome house out in the country side. I hired a fantastic assistant to take some of the pressure off good old me. My little art business is esploding and making people’s lives happier. And the babies continue to be a handful! Life Book 2013 is thriving, people are buzzing with creativity and I’m bursting with new ideas for courses, projects, paintings and psssst; retreats! :D Life is awesome and I’ve also been down, struggling with my usual demons which I won’t go into right now as it will take some time. :)

Anyhoo, let me share with you what happened today, I was brave! I received an unpleasant email and felt really triggered. As much as I know and have the tools to process feelings healthily and properly, my default response to unpleasant feelings is to grab a bag of cookies. It requires energy, awakeness and courage (in my case) to take a moment, stand still, feel my feelings and then process them, instead of just defaulting to cookies. So that is what I did today (feel them, not default them, ha!). It’s a much healthier way to deal with stuff this way. I always endeavour to use this method more than the cookie one (but often fail dismally, ahem, but nevermind, today I didn’t which is what I’m focusing on! ;))

This is how I do it, hope it’s helpful for you too!

STEP 1. First, sit down, notice your body, start internally naming how you are feeling eg: ‘anxious, worried, sad’ and/or ‘a heavy feeling in my stomach’ etc.

STEP 2. Take any kind of pen and your art journal. Start writing down the same feelings. Don’t worry about making it legible, in fact, scribble and write your feelings over the other scribbles/ writings too, this way the writing becomes an interesting texture layer later. I forgot to take a pic of this stage, but under the gelli plate print layer you can see the writing: 

STEP 3. If you have a gelli plate (which are awesome) do a few prints over your writing. Draw patterns onto your gelli plate after you’ve added the paint, then print.

STEP 4. With an old credit card apply some more bright colours in desired areas.

STEP 5. I wanted to include a face. Drawing is a bit easier over gesso and I wanted a bit more white on my page, so I added some gesso with the same card to the page.

STEP 6. I sketched my portrait.

STEP 7. I added more details and built up the shading.

STEP 8. With a white posca pen, I wrote down the needs underneath the feelings I was feeling earlier (ask yourself: ‘why am I feeling this way?’ In my case: I needed acceptance, love, care, compassion and ease). I scribbled the writing down deliberately so that the writing wasn’t very legible. I like for the writing to be part of the texture and art rather than it being something to read.

STEP 9. I added a photo of myself that conveyed the feelings/ mood I was in and collaged some papers under and around it. I also added some washi tape on the page (loooooove washi tape). 

STEP 10. Lastly, I doodled on and around the photo and added the word compassion several times on the photo.

And done! Here are some more shots taken with the more professional camera:

It was a a healing/ nurturing page to make. :)

Hope you enjoyed this post! If you do something similar, leave a link to your blog post below! I’d love to see it!

Mucho muffins. xox

Tam

 

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