Class 3 ~ BE Mindful ~ A peek in Penelope's Journal

Thought it was time to share how things are shaping up in my journal. I *always* have my journal with me in class, so if you want to see these in person during class time, just let me know. But for those of you who aren't able to make it to class, here's what's been happening ...

In Class 3 we talked about mindfulness, and spent a little time being creative with zentangle, mandalas, and colouring. Here's how it all turned out in my journal:

Firstly, I zentangled my hand *again*. This is really one of my favourite exercises. It's uniquely you and fingers have organic shapes, too, so they're easy to divide into sections to work on. To counterbalance all the flowing bits of the hand and the tangles, I created a geometric background page in my journal to glue it onto. First I put some dotted washi tape along the top and bottom edge of the page. Then I divided it up into 16 sections, more or less equal, and coloured each square a different colour using Tim Holtz Distress Crayons in a range of blues and a bit of lime green. If you haven't tried the Distress Crayons in class, please do ~ they are creamy and smudgy (I smudged these squares with my fingers). I also smudged a bit of red along the edges of the washi tape. I used RED because it's directly across from GREEN on the colour wheel (more on this later). Some people think black and white washi tape is boring, but I like it because, being made of paper, you can add whatever colour you like to it.

Next: Mandalas! In class, I handed out what I call "Mandala Starters". They already have concentric rings and dividing lines for you to work on. I'll put them at the bottom of this post so you can print out more if you like. Anywho ... I drew a mandala by following these steps: draw lines from one intersection to another (an intersection is wherever lines cross). Turn the sheet and repeat the same line all the way around the circle. I also mirror imaged the longest line to create a petal effect as well ~ can you see how I did that? I think I'm calling this one Sun Lotus ...

I try not to go into too much technical stuff in class, but it's really worth knowing something about how colours work together, so I really encourage you to colour the colour wheel handout, using whatever medium you like. I coloured mine using Mungyo Watercolor Crayons. They're not as posh as the Caran d'Ache Neocolor II crayons, but they're much more affordable and great to start with. I painted these on using a waterbrush, picking up the pigment while holding the crayon in my hand. Most of us are familiar with the colour wheel, but knowing how to use colours is a good skill to have when working in your journal. If you look at my pages, you'll often see that I use colours *across* from each other to create vibrancy, and colours *next* to each to create restful harmony. Here's my colour wheel:

Colouring: I decided to colour the turtle on the handout pages, again using the Mungyo Watercolor crayons. I painted the whole turtle with a pale green, then added more colours to certain sections. This time, you'll notice that I stayed all on the cool side of the colour wheel ~ green, blue, purple ~ which gives the turtle a calm feeling. Okay, well I can't say for sure the turtle is calmer, but I was after I painted it. :)

I like to cut up the quotes from the handouts and give them a colour background, too. In the first and second pages, the background is made with scrapbooking paper. On the third page, I glued in a sheet of cheap writing paper, then divided it into sections with washi tape. I'm not really pleased with how I divided up each section, so I'll probably change it ... maybe with more washi tape? But I wanted to show you that you don't have to love what you do right away. You can glue it in and then go back and work over it later if it still bugs you. And this one does, so ... it'll get "improved" at some point. Sometimes it's more valuable to keep going than to get stalled on a trivial annoyance ... a lesson for life, perhaps?

Don't be afraid to work with colour. If you're doing collage, just play ~ move things around till they make sense to you. If you're working with other media, like paint and crayons, you need to play to find out what *your* materials do. If you really hate what you create, that's okay ~ it'll still make a good background to create on top of, and it's sometimes better than the blank page.

Below you'll find five Mandala Starter pages for you to play with. Each one has a slight variation in the spacing of the concentric circles. But remember, not all mandalas have to start from the center, somtimes setting them off-center can be quite interesting, too.

Well .. that should keep you busy till next class ...