Things never go as planned

Yesterday I was feeling messy. :D
Sometimes that happens.

This is actually much more pink that it appears in photos, but instead the photos instead prompted several people to ask if I'd been making sacrifices in my studio. :D
I promise not even to the gods of pens and paper.

It was the start to the second journal project I had, which involved including a quote.
I selected instantly a quote from Neil Gaiman...

Go and make interesting mistakes.
Make amazing mistakes
make glorious and fantastic mistakes
Break Rules
Leave the world more interesting for you being here.
Make.
Good.
Art.
~Neil Gaiman

First, I love him. I think he is amazing, and second.. that quote spoke to me from somewhere deep inside, which means it's the right one.

So that was to be these pages...except it didn't feel right. I made a face and went to set it aside to think on it and dropped my journal. Ooops. I'm kind of a klutz sometimes, and it fell open, onto the pages BEHIND my watercolor creation that may have been inspired by my 12 hour criminal minds marathon.
And I made another face...
Because I saw, all along the left side of one of the pages a smear from my red watercolor. Dang it. On my nice, pretty, supposed to be CLEAN pages behind it. Ugh. Double Ugh. Now I wasn't happy with 2 things in my journal and I was only 4 page in...
And the inner monologue starts...
The little voice in my head that I like to keep locked in the closet started to say things like, "That isn't supposed to be there, take those pages out, they're not good enough, isn't this the 2nd time in 10 days you've messed up in something you are supposed to post? You keep making mistakes...."
Cool me responds back with... "Whoa there brat voice, what did you just say?"
And then I realized... I'm making a lot of mistakes ART.
With that, comes things i don't like. I once had someone tell me that all art goes through an ugly stage, an awkward, teenage, adolescent stage and that my quote was about it being ok to make mistakes.
So I came up with this. I messed the pages up a little more. Every word has something I'd have "fixed" in the past. I splattered some ink, and then I did in fact ooops again and closed the journal when I didn't mean to so it transferred.. and came up with a glorious mess.

I don't really like it, but I think I will. And whether or not I "like" it right now.. I love it.  I am going to add in pieces of art that didn't go as planned throughout the year. Things that in the past I'd have relegated to the back of a drawer or tossed in frustration. They now have a place on these pages.. the pages that give me permission to make mistakes.
That's a really nice gift to have given myself.
This art journal thing might be pretty good for me.

Thursday- that means a prompt!

Good morning friends!!!!
Yesterday I played with pine cones. I think they're fascinating but I can't paint them. I really WANT to but they never turn out right. I think they are a really cool symbol of a lot of things so it's probably something you are going to see pop up in my work here and there.
Fun fact of the day...
Did you know that pine cones close up to protect their seeds when it's going to rain? So if you are ever in the woods, wondering if it's going to rain and you see a bunch of closed pine cones, chances are you are going to get wet.

Ok, so I mentioned before that I belong to a group that is doing some art journaling which is new for me, because I've always just been a sketchbook kind of girl who keeps a diary to write in. We get prompts every week to help us on our adventure.

I am mulling over this weeks so that I know where I want to dive in.

I did pick a quote for this weeks page yesterday as well. 

“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.” ~Neil Gaiman

I think that will be a fun one to work with, I'm fantastic at making what I initially view as mistakes, that often turn out to be exactly what I end up liking best about something! I also just mess up a lot :D

I promised that on Thursdays I would come up with a prompt for you to use if you'd like, or to not.... entirely up to you!

Today, I'd like to encourage you to find a "mistake" in your creative world and change it. Maybe it's a drawing/painting you discarded some time ago, perhaps a technique that you gave up on... a dinner you burnt several times...

Something. Whatever you thought of when you read my little prompt there, that's the thing you should think about working on today!

So, once you have your mistake, how can you turn it into something besides a frustration? Zentangle likes to say there are no mistakes... one of the hardest concepts for me to grasp when I see something on my page that I don't love, but let's embrace it and find a way to turn it into something amazing!

I have a piece of paper that I was going to make a mandala on, I don't know why I kept it because nearly my first mark, my pen exploded. 

It'll be fun to see what I can make out of that.