Visual Journaling: A Life Collage

I’ve been silent about a class, Visual Journaling: A Life Collage, that I’ve been offering for the past eight weeks and the last session was on Thursday night so I decided to break my silence. I’m not sure why I haven’t shared about this class before this, or why I haven’t shared weekly like I do with my Artist’s Way Creative Clusters. I think partly it was because we got off to a bit of a rocky start, but that settled down and the group took off and flourished. Maybe because I didn’t post right from the beginning I decided not to jump in mid-stream. What is important is that I got to work with four amazing women and their spirits and work energized me weekly. They were open and receptive to whatever new techniques I had them experiment with. We also focused on a different visual journalist each week, which was a great introduction to the process. The artist's we explored included:

Judy Wise

Sabrina Ward Harrison

Julianna Coles

Dan Eldon

Teesha Moore

Randi Feuerhelm-Watts

During the eight weeks, we played in our own journals each week, following the format I had learned in my Phenomenal Women’s Group with Diane Havnen-Smith. Each week in addition to looking at a particular visual journalist/artist, I shared art and journaling techniques I have gleaned from a bevy of wonderful teachers: Diane, Katie Kendrick, Julianna Coles, Judy Wise, Suan McKee Reese (an English professor at Portland State University), and Melanie Sage. I introduced the women to various resources, including two fabulous mixed media magazines: Cloth, Paper, Scissors and Sommerset Studio.

I will let some of their pages say what words can’t . . . . here is a sampling of some of the pages created during our eight weeks together: