My sister-in-law Gretchin and I are putting together a series of joint art and writing prompt classes that we are calling Journal Jam. We will be announcing the location of the first workshop shortly. In the meantime, we have both been working on our own journal pages. One of the prompts I love to offer comes from a book by Tristine Rainer called Your Life as Story. In it Rainer gives a prompt on How to be ________. The writer than offers a list of criteria describing how to be ______. Gretchin and I plan to use this prompt in our class and as an example I tried my hand at my own.
The night before I had been visiting Gretchin's house where my three-year-old niece Ellie was dancing around in the buff. I decided to write How to Be Three-Year-Old Ellie Dancing. Here's the result:
How to Be Three-Year-Old Ellie Dancing
Be Stark Naked
Lift Your Arms in the Air
Twirl
Mold Your Hands into Tight Little Fists
Roll Them One Over the Other
Do Your Magic
Stare Up Into the Sky with a Smug Look of Satisfaction
Burst Into Song
Sing the Theme to Frozen
Twirl Again
Lose Interest
Walk Across the Room, Strutting like a Drunken Supermodel
Turn and Walk Back Toward Me
Shout "Hey Bee, Look at This!"
Twirl One Final Time.
I then went to work on my own journal pages, but as so often happens the preliminary sketches seemed better than the final result, so I experimented a couple of times.
One of the things I love about digital collage and one of the reasons I turned to working in that medium is that nothing every has to go waste. You can always use a "bad" photo or sketch and transform it into something else. I started to do so with one of the iphone pics I took of my sketch.
I had an older picture of Ellie and when I put them together it seemed as if the two were dancing. I am still working on the collage. This is just the preliminary piece. I'm calling it Shadow Dancers or Fairytale 699.
I'm hoping to add a version of this to my journal pages as well.