The Journal Challenge

Emotions

2010-08-08T01:16:00.000-07:00

Because of a huge amount of workload, we were not able to post for some time.
There was also no wy for both of us to finish this drawing.
So here is just one approach:

I tried to draw emotions.

On the left side I drew happiness and on the right side I drew a green eyed monster (jealousy).

Next time we will be back to normal!

Black & White

2010-07-22T00:36:00.000-07:00

After two other ideas I settled with some doodeling.

Black and white - only one idea

Summer

2010-07-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

Summer means two things for me: the sea and sunflowers!

What I love about summer are the wonderful sunsets at the sea. They are a bit tacky but so beautiful.
So I took my pastels and drew one. I am really content with the result.

And here the reminder:

We would like to invite you all to join our challenge.

We will post the word(s) of the week on Sunday and then we all have one week (till Saturday evening) to create our approach to this word(s). If you want to share your work with all of us (and that would be really wonderful) then mail it to us till Saturday evening. We will post yours and our two pages on Sunday for everyone to see.

It would really be great if you would all share your pages with us.

So, just create a page, take a photo, reduce the size so that it fits into one e-mail and send it to us (thejournalchallenge@gmail.com).

The words of this week will be: “Black and White”!

We really look forward to your approaches and hope to receive lots of mails.

Time

2010-06-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

After watching the "Alice in Wonderland" film by Tim Burton I bought the original "Alice" books by Lewis Caroll. I read them and was amazed by the story.
I can still remeber the white rabbit in the Disney version and I really like him. He is always rushing around trying to beat the time because he is so afraid that he might be too late.
So I decided to draw the white rabbit from "Alice in Wonderland".
The drawings in my book are so beautiful that I chose to draw this rabbit and not the Disney version.
Finally I have to say: "Oh dear, oh dear! I shall be too late!"

We are always looking at our watches, trying to be in time and to squeeze everything in the 24 hours of a day. And sometimes we just forget to look at the nice things in life. So please don't forget to look at the rainbow!

Summer starts on June 21st!
Therefore the word for next week is "Summer"!

For more information see our previous posts.

Sweet 'n' Tasty

2010-06-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

For me the essence of sweet and tasty is a fresh and ripe strawberry. I can't resist them and as soon as the first strawberries appear in the supermarket I have to have them. My secret wish: a strawberry as big as an orange.

I am a huge fan of sweets. I like cookies, cakes, muffins and anykind of chocolate. I really do.

So when thinking about sweet 'n' tasty I immediately thought of a cheesecake. I really like it topped with cherries.

And here the reminder:

We would like to invite you all to join our challenge.

It would really be great if you would all share your pages with us.

So, just create a page, take a photo, reduce the size so that it fits into one e-mail and send it to us (thejournalchallenge@gmail.com).

The words of this week will be: “Time”!

We really look forward to your approaches and hope to receive lots of mails.

Going wild

2010-05-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

The titel of my page is: "Going wild with colors"!

I immediately associated "going wild" with wild animals. First I was thinking of zebras or wolves but then I remembered a trip to Yellowstone and the bisons there. For me they are the perfect example of wild animals, strong and impressive.

And here the reminder:

We would like to invite you all to join our challenge.

It would really be great if you would all share your pages with us.

So, just create a page, take a photo, reduce the size so that it fits into one e-mail and send it to us (thejournalchallenge@gmail.com).

The words of this week will be: “Sweet 'n' Tasty”!

We really look forward to your approaches and hope to receive lots of mails.

Have a nice and creative week.

Hello out there!

2010-05-17T00:54:00.000-07:00

No, we are not lazy and yes, we haven't posted anything this week.

Why not?

That’s easy to answer.

We had a fabulous idea last week. We came together on Sunday and posted our letter and discussed the word(s) of the week and on Tuesday or Wednesday we had the idea to share the word with all of you. No, not in our regular way but before we draw it.

We would like to invite you all to join our challenge.

We will post the word(s) of the week on Sunday and then we all have one week (till Saturday evening) to create our approach to this word. If you want to share your work with all of us (and that would be really wonderful) then mail it to us till Saturday evening. We will post yours and our two pages on Sunday for everyone to see.

It would really be great if you would all share your pages with us.

So, just create a page, take a photo, reduce the size so that it fits into one e-mail and send it to us (thejournalchallenge@gmail.com).

The words of this week will be: “Going wild”!

We really look forward to your approaches and hope to receive lots of mails.

Have a nice and creative week.

Letter

2010-05-09T02:28:00.000-07:00

We are here again!
Sorry for the long delay!

Our challenge for this week was "a letter". I took the letter G. My inspiration were the first letters of a chapter in old books. They are big and heavily ornamented. My letter did not turn out this way - it looks more like a G with a lot of doodeling. But nevertheless I'm rather happy with it.

I tried two different approaches this week and I couldn't decide which one to show on the blog. So I will show you both.
My first page was a grid were I thried out how various letters look and then colored them.

My second page is just a single letter which I tried to decorate with climbing roses. Good intention but it looks more like some string of light attached to the M, which is good also. I am just glad that it looks good. I wasn't sure about that when I drew it.

Window

2010-04-28T02:09:00.000-07:00

We are so so sorry. Because of a huge amount of work we didn't have the time to do our weekly challenges for quite a long time.

Even this week only I found the time to do the window for our challenge.
I found inspiration in my pictures I took in Italy. I really like those window or door pictures one can find in so many calenders. So I started to take pictures of windows and doors I liked instead of buying the expensive calenders.

This one is inspired by a window I found in Siena, Tuscany.

Next week everything will be back to normal and we will both be posting our pictures. At least we hope so.

Spring

2010-04-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

As I walk my dog everyday in the woods I see spring coming. There are more and greener leaves on the trees and on the ground every day and although the trees seem bare there are green leaves and flowers everywhere. On a sunny day I took my camera with me and tried to capture this feeling. There is a large picture with seemingly bare trees but on the close-ups one can see that there are a lot of tiny white flowers on the ground and fresh green leaves on the trees.

I had an immidiate idea what to do with the word "spring". When I was a kid I had the wonderful book "Big Bird brings spring to Sesame Street". Poor Big Bird is fed up with snow and winter and buys six wonderful flowers to put in his nest. During his walk home he gives all the flowers to friends in Sesame Street. So he brings spring to it because there are these beautiful colored flowers everywhere. I really really wanted to do something with the story of this book. I read it again - it is still so lovely - and started to look up the different flowers on the internet. Then I came across this photo of "Prismatic Spring" in Yellowstone National Park. I was there in 1998 and it was so amazing. I really recommend going there.
I printed this photo and glued it on a black gesso background. I also rubbed this photo with purple pastels to get a more extraordinary look. I hope you can see it on the picture (I think you can see it in the left corner).

Buildings

2010-03-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

This week I found inspiration in my "Inspiration-File" on my computer. This is a place where I save things I really like or I want to try out myself.
I think that this weeks page speaks for its own.

"Buildings" wasn't as easy as I thought. But then I remembered the wooden building blocks of my childhood and how much I loved to play with them (so now you can guess my age).

I cut templates out of cardboard and started to build my castle, as I did quite a while ago. I coloured the blocks with watercolour pencils, but didn't add water afterwards because it would habe diluted the "wooden" effect.

Abstract

2010-03-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

I love the paintings of Wassiliy Kandinski. The theme "abstract" was the perfect opportunity to try something similar.

This week I found inspiration in Paul Klee. He did a painting once with this shapes which is called "Viaduct break ranks".
I tried to give it a personal touch and I also wanted to try Gesso once. So I painted a black background and draw the viaducts with gel pens.

Here is the orignal painting:

Copyright: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7Se7iswAanA/Sb7hmvT7r-I/AAAAAAAAGRU/xXaAzENAeDg/s400/Paul-Klee-Viaducts-Break-Ranks.jpg

Green

2010-03-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

This weeks word was easy for me. I really like to take pictures and have a huge selection of photos. I looked through them and searched for my favourite green pictures. I found a lot. Some of them became part of this collage.
I am extremly happy that I had so many pictures with flowers because I think those other colors make the green more shiny and lively.

I decided to write the word "green" in many different languages and in different shades of green.

For those interested here are the translations
green = english
grün = german
viridis = latin
grön = swedish
gronn = norwegian
zelená = czech
zelen = croatian
groen = dutch
berde = basque
verde = portugese
seleno = bulgarian
gron = danish
sabz = persian
yecil = turkish
zöld = hungarian
hijau = indonesian
groenn = islandic
chloros = greek
rangi ya majani = swahili
gwyrdd = walsh
uaine = gaelic
zielen = polish
xanh = vietnamese
hovy = guarani (a dialect of Paraguay)
midori = japanese
verda = esperanto
vihreä = finnish
vert = french
verde = spanish and italian
sélen = russian

Light

2010-03-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

The first thing that came to my mind about this week's topic was drawing an exploration grid and draw things concerning light into the squares. Then it took me one whole week (6 days actually) to convince myself that I can draw all those things. I am not very proud of my drawing skills but I finally believed in myself and now I really like this page.

This week I have learned a lesson:
Always believe in yourself. I am now convinced that I can draw.

When the word "light" came up I immediately thought of the moon. Which is a false image because we all know that the moon is not shining on its own, it is just a reflection of the sunlight. And still it is the only natural light availabe in the night. So why not stick to it.

I painted an acrylic background which gives a nice dark color (actually it is a dark purple) and an interesting texture. I printed a black and white image of the moon that I found on the Internet and colored it with a yellow pastel chalk that I applied to a piece of fabric and then rubbed onto the picture. I glued the moon to the background, cut the silhoutte of a tree out of black paper and glued this to the page.

Music

2010-02-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

As music can be interpreted in so many ways I really had a hard time deciding what I wanted to do.

Eventually I cut four notes out of paper and did a collage with different pictures showhing music in many senses.

For the background I wanted to create a black page. I used water soluable crayons but as I applied the moisture the black faded into a dirty grey. Not so good! The lines for the notes were drawn with pitt pens in different colors.

I still like the journal page but would have prefered if the page would have stayed black.

This week I tried to collect ideas about the theme first and then start making the page.
I had quite a lot of ideas and I finally decided to do a kind of jazzy page. When thinking about Jazz music the first picture that comes to my mind is that of a smoky jazz club with dimmed light and saxophon music. Cliché, I know. So I looked for a picture of a saxophon player and found the one of Winston Marsalis. Then I thought about what kind of background I would like to do. Because I think that a picture should speek for itself I settled for different jazz lyrics.
To add a little color I draw many notes flying out of the saxophon some got lost on the page.

This week I am really proud of my page. I had an idea, thought about it for a day or two and then created a harmonious picture.

Tree

2010-02-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

The word of the week was "Tree".
It was the first week of our challenge and I didn't do much thinking about what I was going to do. My first idea was to draw a hammock between two trees. Lying in a hammock reading a book is the ultimate symbol of peace, quietness and joy for me.
I used watercolor pencils for the tree, watercolor for the grass and tree structure and colored pitt pens for the hammock. The green of the grass was done with pastels. The ballons are first stamped and then colored.

I am quite happy with this first page but I really learned that I need to do more thinking about the project to be really satisfied or even proud of my work.

When the word "tree" came up I knew immediately that I wanted a poem about a tree and then create something around this poem.
I searched the internet for quite a while but found only two poems that I kind of liked. And then I discovered the words from a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, where he tells him about the colors of the olive trees.
I looked at the pictures of van Gogh's olive trees and tried to paint the tree as he did with gnarled branches and small brush strokes for the clustered leaves. I used acrylic paints.

Hello!

2010-02-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

Welcome! We are happy that you found our blog.

We are a team of two and we discovered art journaling a few months ago.
Since then we took two online courses and really got hooked.

So we decided to start a challenge. Each week we choose a word and each of us creates a page with this word as an inspiration.

Our goal is to get creative, use the different techniques we have learned and improve our skills.

Once a week we will post our pages so that you can see our different approaches to the theme.