Scanning the horizon – and beyond.

Over the last few days I have been a chronicler of my chronicles.

I am scanning every page of every journal I have made in the last year or so. Why this sudden need to capture these pages?… well, that’s an interesting story…

I have a scanner on my office desk, and a scanner in my art studio,  and both are used regularly. So when Dawn Devries Sokol emailed me to remind me to get examples of my work in for her next book, I said: “easy!”.

Then when I went to email of some Journal pages, I discovered I did not have a single ‘completed’ journal page on file from the past 12 months. Not ONE! I had hundreds of scans. But they are all of the work in progress phase.

I got quite a shock. I only seem to scan my work before I add my journaling!

What gives? Well, I had a good look at what I had scanned. Lots of backgrounds. Lots of semi completed figures. And then I remembered – “Oh yeah, I scan when I start to like something“.

I take my page to the scanner when I feel any skerrick of the “I don’t know what to do nexts” which usually heralds an attack of  “I’m going to ruin this” syndrome. It’s a handy ritual to remove resistance… If it’s scanned, I can move on without worry.

So I have the building of many pages on record. And that is interesting for me as an artist looking at my creative process.

And now on to the mystery of having no ‘finished’ pages scanned. Well, once it’s ‘finished’, the juice of it, the joy, is past. It seems the ‘completed’ page isn’t important to me.  Making it is the important part. I feel like turned some major art corner at some point without even realising it.

My Journals are super precious to me, but not in the way that you may expect. I need them so I can show people new to Journaling at what is possible. How AWESOME Journaling is. I am completely passionate about getting as many peeps as I can to start this soul-nourishing, heart-soothing, hurt-erasing, stress-relieving, joy-filling practice.

I have my Journals on display at shows and exhibitions. I guess I think of them as lures to draw people into a better life more than precious artifacts of my life!

Epiphany.

But I did need to scan my finished work. I have two fab scanners, one is a hi res ooh la la, the other is an A3 multi- function that I bend to my will.

An added bonus is the Goldmine of collage material I have. I love re-purposing my own work.

another added bonus of all this scanning ( and it has literally taken days!) is that I am laser-focused for my PRINT & SCAN class starting in August. More news on that soon.

xoxox

Jane/ Danger

p.s. before you ask – the birds are from the serviettes here!