at the speed of

I recently bought the book Art at the Speed of Life by Pam Carriker. It's been out for a while and there have been online groups who worked thru the book chapter by chapter. It was on my wish list of books but I hadn't been inspired to actually buy it until I had an about-to-expire 20% coupon for Barnes & Noble, of which there is a huge one in our local mall.


The main point of the book is that you can fit art into your regular life. Each chapter has a guest artist project, then Pam gives a speed-of-life version that gives a similar result in much less time. Every chapter also has essays and articles by Pam and various other artists on a variety of topics. I'm enjoying it and would recommend it simply for the projects and techniques. All the time saving tips are a bonus.


There are a lot of good ideas in the book and since I don't need much of a reason to make yet another journal of some sort, I made one of her 7 day journals. Actually it's nothing like hers, I guess, since I used a cover and didn't make it form one sheet of paper. I made 3 signatures from 140lb cold press watercolor paper, nice and thick so I can do all sorts of wet stuff to it. Made a spine of doubled upholstery fabric and covers from a corrugated cardboard from a box at work, glued the spine on and stitched the sigs thru the spine. Wa-la as they say in France.


Made a glaze from 1 part acrylic paint, one part gel medium and 2 parts water and glazed several spreads with a few different colors. I'm hoping the glaze doesn't have the stick-to-itself properties that a page painted in full strength acrylics does. We'll see.




For my first journal entry I chose a yellow spread, glued down some old book pages, added some raw sienna and gesso. I wanted to try the hand sanitizer transfer method so I chose a transparency of my mom at about 3 or 4 years old on a pony with her dad standing by. I tried various amounts of sanitizer gel but had no success getting the image to transfer. So I stuck it down with gel medium and moved on. I needed something on the left so found a pic of my great grandfather, father of my mom's dad, and made a gel transparency, one of my favorite techniques. 


Stamped some gesso circles using the tube from a roll of adding machine paper. After looking at it a while, I got out some turquoise paint and put some around the edges and in the centers of the white circles. Then I sat down with a black marker and doodled the circles, the edges, and some of the sequin waste stenciling I had added earlier. Gave it all a coat of gloss medium and varnish and called it done. Three generations here. I'm happy with it and plan to fill the journal with projects and techniques from Pam's book.