When One Door Closes

 

This entry was inspired by the guest host Laly Mille at the Life Books 2022 taster.  Her journal page was all about Poetic Secrets Journaling.  I hope to recreate something similar to what I learned in her class and share it with our guest host, my friend and co-administrator this month at Art Journal Journey, Valerie-Jael whose blog is Bastelmania.

Valerie's theme is When One Door Closes, Another One Opens.  Possibly a poor imitation of Laly's example, but I am actually quite proud of this.  It took forever to create and finish, too.

I'm working with this new camera and it doesn't show close ups well at all. 

I used ransom type letters to write the words.  This is "When."

More ransom letters spell "one door."

This one is fairly obvious.

These ransom letters spell "closes."

Here I deviate by using my own handwriting, which I'm sure is hard to read.  Because you may need to translate my handwriting:

find a door that welcomes you.  You will never be sorry.

Looks like that key can be used to unlock happiness.

Use this key.

I would be happy in this builder inspired bird house that sits among wind chimes. There are many doors in this bird house.

I even dug out the date stamp Valerie sent me.  I keep forgetting to use it.

This door is wide open, inviting all of us inside.

This was a very intense spread.  I began by finding two doors in a brochure about exterior paint.  One door was closed, the other open.  I had to fill a lot of the areas around the left page, so I looked at magazine images that would compliment the gray and black door and entry.  I used a lot of gray acrylic paint to fill the area.

The flowers on the far left were from a travel magazine, the greenery representing the bottom steps was from a calendar, and the black and gray image on the right was a part of a magazine that I painted with gray paint.  All letters were from at least five magazines.

For the right side, I cut and distressed a bright yellow paint chip that I used to write the sentiment by hand using one of my new gel pens.  I painted the bottom of the page with orange and red watercolors, then distressed two paint chip samples, one orange and one red.  For the orange one, I added a house key, and for the red one, I wrote a sentiment using another gel pen.  The bird house was cut from a Christmas magazine suggesting gifts for men.  As mentioned above, I added the date stamp sent to me by Valerie.  I created this spread in my Coll-AH-ge Two altered book.

Valerie, Chris, Erika, Yvonne, Bleubeard, and I are delighted you joined us and hope to see you this month at Art Journal Journey with your own take on When One Door Closes, Another One Opens.

Some of you may have noticed we have changed the "Dreaded Rules" a bit at Art Journal Journey starting last month.  We now allow mini journals and journal pages, but they must look like a journal and not a card.  Please be aware, we still do NOT allow cards or tags.  There are tons of challenge blogs that accept those.  We gladly welcome art journal pages that meet the theme requirements, altered book pages, canvases, loose or stand alone pages including fabric, and digital art.  Large size journal art is equally welcome.  To reiterate, we still do not allow cards, tags, index cards, ATCs, or ATCoins, unless they are part of a journal page, and as much as we don't want to, will be forced to delete your entry.  See you soon at Art Journal Journey.