Messy May - a daily journal challenge
This year, I decided to participate in Get Messy’s Messy May challenge. It’s a daily challenge for the month of may, where each day you have a prompt, and a short video lesson by all kinds of different mixed media artists. The Get Messy world usually involves working in sketchbooks or art journals. This time, I decided to use up some of the papers that I have floating around the studio to make a new little book dedicated just for this challenge. I was hoping that if I took the challenge in this direction that it would encourage me to complete the challenge. You see, tasks like a daily challenge, or even using prompts, is a difficulty for me. I find it hard to produce work some days that line up with a specific prompt. I think that having the mini lessons definitely helped in the creative encouragement for me. I didn’t count my pages when creating my book, therefore I didn’t line up the whole challenge with the book. That actually worked out for my benefit, as there were some prompt days that I definitely didn’t resonate with. I ended up with 24 pages, which worked great for the days that I wanted to make. I also didn’t put pressure on myself to get something done every day, incase the schedule of the day just didn’t accommodate a page creation.
This challenge, I also pushed myself to try to record my processes more. My friend asked if I did videos of my whole painting process, and I answered her, saying I often forgot to press record. This month, most days I tried to remember to record, as well as push myself to learn how to edit the videos and get them on youtube. So yes, I have also started a youtube. It is very basic right now, as I’m finding my way around making videos. It’s definitely not my forte, and would gladly recruit my brother in law’s skill if I could! Still, my work is being recorded, and you can watch the first couple for now! I wish I could do the nice asmr creativity videos, but, alas, I have a shared studio space with my husband’s office, and he’s on phone calls often. Plus, two little people who love to run in and out all the time add to the not as nice background noise.
Here’s a quick flip through video of the finished Messy May concertina (a fancy word for an accordion style book) as well as still shots of each page created. (bonus, I have an empty concertina book that I made that’s available in the shop at the writing of this post! It has some backgrounds created, ready to be filled with your words or added collage work.)
Stay tuned, as Get Messy is partnering with art journaler Meg Journals and a bunch of other artists as Meg hosts Junk Journal July, which I’m leaning towards participating in, as I enjoyed the challenges of the May project so so much.
Click on the images below to see the pages up close.
