get messy: season of words week two

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days–three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” – John Keats

Here are my second week art journal spreads for Get Messy Season of Words. I feel like my pages this week are pretty sparse, but that’s only because I was sick for most of the week and really didn’t have the energy to do anything. I’m surprised I still managed to get at least four spreads done, one for each of the prompts given to us. I didn’t really think too much about each spread, I just kind of did whatever I felt like doing, without too much thought.

One of the prompts for this week was to create a block-out poem from the text in our books. I did this before in my Summer of Love art journal. My book is an old astronomy textbook for teenagers, so it was only appropriate to create a poem about the sun. Mine reads:

the sun
the sun is round
the sun is always turning
the sun is high in the heavens
when he is rising or setting
he passes behind trees or mountains,
the sun is bigger than a mountain.

I blocked out the words with gesso, leaving the original illustration of the sun setting along the horizon just because it fit so well. I just added a bit of watercolor to give the page some color because it looked way too plain with just the white of the gesso on the beige of the old book page.

Here are the other spreads I did. I really liked how the butterfly spread came out. The prompt was to make a cutout with the page, so that the page behind it showed through. We didn’t have to use whatever we cut out of the page, but I happened to use my butterfly punch and I didn’t want to throw them out, so I used them on the corresponding page to make a really neat spread. Then I played around with some watercolor techniques and it came out really cool! It’s my favorite spread out of the bunch. Hopefully next week I’ll feel a bit better and make some way better spreads!