I had a lot of trouble coming up with a "character" for this year's fake journal, so I went with Roz's suggestion to think of a technique that I wanted to try and then figure out who would use that technique.
I wanted to try a line and wash technique that Gerald Brommer calls "color independent of line" in one of his workshops. I like how the technique looks, and thought it would be quick and not too labor intensive.
I decided to use gardens, since it was spring, and gardens lend themselves well to this technique. In hindsight, maybe should not have restricted myself to a single subject, especially that subject, since I do paint realistic, close focused flowers in my real life.
My "character" was someone who plans and reads about gardens, and works hard to make her garden beautiful—in contrast to myself who never gets around to doing much garden work and must buy flowers at the grocery store if I want to paint them. It was hard to distance myself from my character though, because real flowers and real weather were occurring all around me. Perhaps it would have been better to have placed my character in a different climate—maybe tropical, so that she wouldn't be writing about what was actually growing here. Perhaps it would have been better to have used a different subject matter as well as a new technique, but I was trying to keep it simple.
I liked and always wanted to try this technique, but honestly, coming up with an image and a quote that would work with it every day was a bit challenging, and I did get bored with it on occasion. I had also intended to put a bit of gardening advice on every spread, but since April is early for gardening in my area, I ran out of things that could realistically be done in the garden—thus the change of location/climate would have helped with this.
I loved the idea of using quotes though, and plan to use them in my regular journal. And as usual, since I am not a disciplined, every day journaler, I fell behind and did not complete all 30 page spreads. But I like what I've done with the 24 spreads that I did do, and I would really like to finish the rest at some point.P.S. I eventually finished 29 of the 30 pages.
