For the past couple years, I’ve been journaling alongside a big group of people online called Get Messy Art Journal. They’ve provided prompts, tutorials, inspiration, and an active online community. I’ve learned so much and been really encouraged by being a part of what they’re creating. And now…

 

Guess what?…

 

I’m on the Get Messy Creative Team for 2018! **cue enthusiastic cheering**

 

Can you find me in the team pic?

 

 

I am blown over by the honor of being a part of things behind the scenes this year. There’s so much arty goodness and a sincere desire to provide creative inspiration across the world, it makes you more aware of the unseen ripples of positivity that widely go unacknowledged.

 

There have been a lot of things happening behind the scenes, all really fantastic but there’s definitely a learning curve, so my attention has been focused there. I hope to post here every couple weeks with pics of what I’ve created and other art journal-related goodies.

 

The year is organized into seasons and the current season is focused on Kindness. See? I knew you’d love it.

 

 

Although we receive weekly prompts not all of my pages are in response to those prompts (some are, some aren’t). Because I’m on the Creative Team, this year I get to help contribute to the prompts! Hooray!

 

Many times I just use the general inspiration of the topic to create pages that go along with that theme — or pages that go completely in another direction! I know, it’s all over the place, but that’s the beauty of it and of art journaling. You don’t have to do it a certain way in order for it to be worth doing. It’s so responsive to each moment, it has the freedom to be whatever it needs to be.

 

 

See what I mean? No real mention of kindness or anything kindness-related in that spread, but because I made it in the last couple weeks, I’m going to share it here. Agreed? Agreed.

 

 

The next bundle of photos shows the development of a page.

 

;

 

 

 

The final product, which I’m pretty happy with, looks like this:

 

 

 

I’m basically in love with that quote from Mary Oliver. The full quote is even better and reads,

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”

It’s so perfect.

 

One of the fun ways of practical kindness we were encouraged to try was to make a page, turn it into a postcard (either by turning it into a PDF we could print or by printing photos of it, etc.), then leave that postcard as a happy arty bright spot in a stranger’s day.

 

 

On the way to pop these in random places around town, I snapped this pic.

 

 

I tried to explain to my kids what I was doing and they were pretty confused. Like, wait, you’re going to just leave that there? Can you DO that? What if someone sees you? Is this okay? It was pretty funny.

 

In response to this idea of giving away art, I was going to try and create a bunch of tags to give to a group of people I volunteer with. Nice idea right? Even if they didn’t totally dig the painting, if it just wasn’t their style (which is okay, because we can’t all like the same things. That would be weird.), they would probably appreciate being appreciated, if that makes sense. I made a good start and this was all coming along fine…

 

 

But apparently the cat felt differently and expertly knocked over my paintbrush rinse water for optimum damage. About half of them are ruined, but despite this the cat still lives with us…for now. I was able to salvage a couple pieces of the ruined tags, and added one of them to another page. Win!

 

 

Lift the flap for a little kindness encouragement.

 

 

Okay, I’ve probably totally overwhelmed you now. Thanks for hanging in there.

 

I do plan to share more of my pages this year so you will see more of that here. Like one of my pages mentioned I do think that kindness is the best way forward, especially when things right now feel so polarized and heated. There are reasons why things are polarized and heated, and I don’t mean to say they should not be so; however, if we approach one another with kindness, I think we’ll all get through our days better.

 

Hope your week goes swimmingly!