Laura's Art Journal

The next several posts take you through an art journal I recently made for our retired bureau director, Laura VanValkenburg. Laura loves birds and has images of them throughout her home and in our office. When she saw my first attempt at art journal construction, from a class taught by my pals Kerri and Marilyn, she loved it and we planned one as a gift to her. Lots of people wrote in the journal either on papers that would be assembled into the piece or directly into the journal. It's easy to make birds the theme but this journal allowed me to add themes of leadership, fashion (Laura's a fashionista), family, dreams, success, and teamwork.

It was the first big mixed media project that I worked on and doing it in my newly organized work space was lots of fun. I pulled things from so many different places. Looking at it now, I see that I've starting looking for pieces for mixed media art everywhere I go. Since then, I've debated about going back to my original class journal or starting fresh.

Now I'm in the middle of an altered book class and I've spent quite a bit of time on that. There will definitely be posts of that. This is the messiest the new room has become since we built it because so many things are used in an altered book.

I'm still working on traditional card making and I plan to get back posting original work here again. That was the purpose of this blog: to link my card art to others. But for now, I'm pleased to share, in its entirety, Laura's journal. Now I'm an artist. Yeah.