Abracadabra Alacazam!

A friend of mine, Susan Feinstein, recently launched a new business: Perfect Pairings for Conscious Singles. In addition to coordinating and planning events, and doing relationship coaching, she is currently offering an eight-week class entitled Conscious Dating and Relationship Success. To enrichen the sessions, Susan wanted the women to experience visual journaling, so she asked me to facilitate a private class for her group. That class took place on Thursday night at Alley Art Studio.

First, I prepared packets for all of the ladies and got the tables set up.




I decided to use a technique taken from Sally Jean Alexander's book, Pretty Little Things. The technique is called Abracadabra Collage and involves writing various art techniques onto little slips of paper and drawing them out of a hat/bowl/whatever you have on hand. The scraps of paper had such things as paint, sand, stamp, smudge, pencil, text . . . . and about a dozen more ideas.

The women all had their own journals, so I immediately began drawing the little slips of paper from a vase. I kept the women moving so that they wouldn't have time to second guess their progress or allow their critic to get too settled in.




At the end of the class we did a little show and tell and I asked each woman how they liked the process. They all enthusiastically responded that they had fun, the process was very non-threatening, and they were pleased with their pages. Ahhhh, a successful introduction to the fun of visual journaling.