lara

Hands down my favorite time of year in Atlanta. Not that it ever gets so cold you're praying for the spring, but the fresh smell in the year, the annual flowers popping up, the warm sun... just love love love the season.



I visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens and walked amongst thousands of tulips, daffodils and petunia's.





I just adore these colors together! Mother Nature's palette...



This is pretty cool - taken downtown on a lunch walk:



From my photobooth app:



Also went to northern georgia and went on the wine highway spring tour. Some vines before the grapes start to grow:

This page came about after i started to lose my way, my confidence, my self worth... i just kept repeating the word "refocus" over and over in my head, without really thinking about it...



To tag onto that earlier thought ... the photo i took after a particularly rewarding and liberating boxing session at the gym. I wanted to capture the sweat and the attitude. The Gelli Print behind it was one that had actually gone pretty south - i just did too many layers, yet i didn't want to throw it away. The chaos of it works well with the sentiment!



Well, if these pages don't tell a story of how a week in my life went ... this background is actually a piece of paper i used to clean my brayer, stamps and stencils off between prints. These papers are almost more interesting to me than the Gelli Prints!



And, yes, to end on the optimistic note... i love this sentiment. We are a sum of our experiences, postive and negative - both are needed to feel the other.

As i had known, i've ended up with stacks of Gelli prints! And what better way to use them is to make some art journal pages!

I'm trying something new with the art journal - making the pages and then binding them together at a later date. This is so i can more easily use the Gelli Prints. Question is, how to bind them... but i'm sure i'll figure that out at some point!

So... i got me a Gelli plate a couple of weeks ago and I'm finally starting to figure out how to get results that make me go all squishy inside! And it's true ... now i have like a couple of dozen sheets of prints just waiting for me to do something with them ... but what? It's almost worse than blank white page syndrome...

But this "Believe" print is the first i've done where i'm just completely enamoured with the results and i have no idea how i even got them other than lots of layers, addition and subtraction.



This is one of the very first ones i did. It's pretty cool too - i used too much paint but that made for cool texture (if you see it in person). I put some washi tape on it, mostly to have somewhere to put the quote. This has been my greatest challenge so far - the gelli prints are all so detailed and covered, i can't figure out how to bring them to the next stage of art journalling or canvas art. But, no fear, i will!

And now for something completely different...



This was inspired by the LifeBook2014 workshop I'm taking - using white space. Laughing my ass off here, cause anyone who knows me knows i'm not really adept at using white space. It's not that i fear it, it's just that i tend to cover the hell out of everything i do with paint and texture. So this was done with some sprays, very simple, and the U2 quote from "Love is Blindness" fits the sentiment perfectly! But when can't i find the perfect U2 quote? Hahahaha.