Get Messy Game

I have been off my art journalling game in a major way lately. It's partly because I was on the road for most of May and partly the general picking-up-the-pace that happens when cozy winter nights yield to seasons when leaving the house can actually be an enjoyable experience. Except this is DC, of course, so we had about two weeks of that before swamp season set in.

I am a bit bummed that I missed the Season of Brave entirely. And I'm reminded that once you get out of a habit, it gets harder and harder to jump back in. It's as true for art journaling as it is for exercise (did I really wake up at 6:45 to work out every weekday?!) or any other element of my routine.

So Vanessa's Get Messy game - instructions, each day of the week, for what to put on your page - came at the perfect time for me. The step-by-step process took out the intimidation factor and reminded me that this can be fun. I tend to want to come up with a Great Idea for a prompt and then make the vision come to life on the page - this taught me that you can play and experiment and make it up as you go along.

This isn't my favorite spread ever, but it was a lot of fun to make. (The flowers on the left side are not actually part of it, they're just hanging around from this page.) The journaling - "you mean it really can be that easy?!" - captures what this process felt like. And it's true of so much more than art journaling for me. I tend to overthink and to overcomplicate and to do things the hard way - but more often than not, it really can be that easy.