My life in the new year, and what I want - more and less

One of the things I think about as the new year begins is what I want more of and less of in the year to come, and I designed an art exercise for my journal.

I use the faces below ~ one facing right (to indicate looking forward) for things I want *more* of in the year to come, and the other facing left (to indicate looking backward) for the things I want *less* of in the new year.

I glue them in my journal facing out from the spine so that I can create a double-page spread to give me more room for artwork, as you can see below:

I usually start with the writing part of the exercise. I've noticed that about 3/4 of the way through any writing exercise, I seem to hit upon the truth of my answer to the question, and I use that as a focal point for the artwork. In the *more* page, that truth was "It's time to follow that spark".
I wanted to let you know that the bulk of the bits and pieces in the artwork came from collage sheets from Tangle Baxter & Co., who sells digital collage sheets and workshops. I'm a big fan of Tangie's materials since they come digitally and I can print them out over and over to cut up and use in my journals. The 3 sheets I used come from this set at her website.

For this page, the bit of truth was this: "Seriously, it's time to let some stuff just go".
I found this lovely misty photograph in a magazine and I wanted to stretch it all the way across the two pages by tearing it into narrower and narrower strips, like sound echoing across the page. I filled in the gaps with strips of brown paper and wrote the words sideways in the spaces in between. The face looked a bit empty till I found a closed eye in a fashion magazine that gave it some soul.

Here's a previous year's version of this exercise as well:

One last page in my current journal has all the bits and pieces from our usual page 7 of the handouts:

Nothing too fancy on this one ... I chose two colours ~ red and black, after finding a contemplative image of a woman in red. Then I filled in the intervening spaces with red and black washi tape, and bordered the quotes with black china marker.