Crazed with the love of the light

Fuel or fodder for your art journaling, that's what your photos are for. Especially the random shots taken on walks with your iPhone. Those are the best.

Just start with a giant sunflower head, peeking over a fence. Snap a few images, edit with your assorted apps, and you're ready to go. I upload to flickr these days, my phone won't let me download to my computer. Some glitch, I guess. But you can by-pass that problem.

Download/upload, whatever the jargon, to flickr. Download to your computer. Edit some more with your Photoshop Elements or photo editing software. Size to your liking and  put multiple sizes on an 8 1/2 by 11 sized layout. Save to a flash drive. Drive to your local Office Max. Get some prints on 12 point paper.

Seems like a lot of steps, but in the long run it saves me the frustration of printing multiple, less than satisfactory, prints on my home printer.

In the meantime, search the Internet for a quote or two that seems to fit the topic of your photo. I decided to search for sunflower and yellow. I was working on this page in Pam Carriker's Journal 365 class. This particular assignment suggested printing or stamping the word of a color repeatedly on your background and then limit your palette to that color ( and it's complement, or analogous colors, and etc.)

But back to our Internet, quote search. One of my favorite things to do. Sometimes, they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes you love 'em but can't use 'em.

And sometimes I don't know what they mean, oh well.

I found these and liked them...and used some of them.

• There is no blue without yellow and without orange.    Vincent Van Gogh
• We've been in a war and a recession. That's why acccent colors with yellow and purple are popular. They're optimistic and flirty and happy colors. David Bromstad
• What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers! Austin Dobson
• “Sometimes silence is not golden -- just yellow.”
• “Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidites swirling up from the earth, And life itself exhaling that central breath! Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light”
• Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do. - Helen Keller, Cancer

After I had selected my color, Yellow Ochre (not okra), I searched for papers from magazines. Just ripped them right out! Fun, but be sure to you use your own copy and not a neighbor's and especially not the library copy.
 
I applied some of my base color, thinned with water, to my journal page and let it dry. Then I stamped the word yellow ochre, all over, using a large sized alphabet set and paint instead of ink.
 

Somewhere in the midst of this process, you paw through your stash of ephemera and other paper goodies and look for "stuff" that fits your color mood. I added the magazine and ad scraps, as well as some quilt design wrapping paper.
 
I love to add cut out letters to my pages and art work, and if you should get a ransom letter in the mail, it isn't from me, honest! I periodically cut up magazines and put the letters in two of those embroidery floss holders, one letter in each slot. It's great then you can browse through your alphabet stash and find fonts, sizes and colors to enhance your art page. Be careful it doesn't spill on the floor!
 

By now you may be crazed by the whole process, but it's all such a fun way to use your photos and languishing art stash!  Don't forget to doodle to your heart's content with your white gel marker and some prisma color pencils!