Behind the Art with Angi Barrs

Hello everyone! I am here to share another page with you that explores January's emotion - "Empathy"!

This page is all about being an empathetic friend.

My youngest daughter has the heart for being a true friend. When someone is down, she immediately wants to give someone a pep talk to make them smile again.

She truly has a heart for caring for others. Family members, teachers, and friends have all told me how compassionate she is. That is a wonderful quality to have - especially as a young person.

I just love the embellishments in the January kit. The "happy day" sentiment is just one of the phrases that Rachel expresses all of the time. She always urges others to be happy!!!

I encourage you to make more layouts about the sweet characteristics that exists in those around you. The kit has wonderful paper and embellishments that will make your page special for years to come.

Behind the Art with Angi Barrs

Hello everyone! I am so happy to be back again to share another page that I made using January's emotion - "Empathy".

I believe that we all can feel empathy for another person. We may see someone and feel this emotion while walking down a street. We may feel this when thinking about a family member. We may even feel this emotion in the workplace.

I created this page to represent the compassion that I feel for others in my workplace.

Many people know that I am a teacher. Not only do I teach academics, but I am also a surrogate mom in a way too. I teach in a low income area. Most of my students don't have the love and support that you would expect in the average household.

I feel so much compassion for my students on a daily basis. Some do not have all of the school supplies that they need. Some don't have a parent at home to make sure that they complete their homework. And some may not have enough to eat. The list of their needs is a long one.

The photo on this layout are my hands holding a little wooden bird. 

This photo represents my compassion for the kiddos in my class. They work hard to make good grades, despite their circumstances. I am here for them always! I do my best to ensure that they have a positive place to learn. 

The paper and embellishments in this kit helped me express the emotion behind the creation. I love the stitched embellishments and the wooden hearts. Be sure to check out this month's kit. It will surely inspire you to create more meaningful pages!

Behind the Art with Jen Matott

Have you ever felt that the news/ media isn't being completely truthful with the public?  I often feel like I'm being manipulated when I watch the national news.  I used to blindly believe all that they dished out but now that I'm older, I don't always take what is being portrayed completely at face value. I've had enough... I try to teach my children to see the newspapers, media, movies and commercials as only one part of the story.  Most of the time it is told in one point of view.  It is rare that you see a news broadcast that tells all sides of the story in a fair and open way.  I am tired of feeling like I have to have the newest thing, be the perfect mom, look a certain way or think what is popular to think. 

 For this layout, I used Bead Gel through the stencil and then sprayed with the gold/ silver Gelato mist that I made for my "Tough Love" layout.  I did add a bit of perfect pearls (pink from a previous SFTIO kit) to the mix to give a pinkish shimmer to it.

 I cut the speech bubble from one of the papers in the kit and backed the cut out letters with scraps from the various papers I used on other layouts. Great way to use up some little pieces.

 I wanted to show my lack of empathy for the news media's one-sided reporting by using a photo of me with my hand out.

Sometimes people can draw empathy from you that is not necessarily honest in their methods of doing so.  I resent that I can be manipulated in that way.  For kids, it's hard to discern what is real and what is fake... I hope my kids can tell when something is not all together true on TV.  What do you think? Are you easily swayed by media or do you question their motives and viewpoints? 

Behind the Art with Angi Barrs

Hello everyone! I am here to share a very special page with you. I'm also throwing in another tip to use as you create using January's emotion - "Empathy"!

What is empathy anyway?

It is defined as:
- The feeling that you understand and share another person's experiences and emotions.

There are so many people around us that have the keen ability to show empathy towards others. I am around people all the time. Sometimes you don't notice certain character traits right away. When I study and observe people that are close to me, I often see moments of caring shining through. These people are what I call "gentle souls".

This page is a prime example of this.

I'd also like to share another tip with you this week. Be mindful of choosing just the right photo for your page. The photo can help you express the emotions and feelings of your page.

For example, I purposely used a black and white photo. I believe that it helps express the softness of this gentle moment.

My cutie pie nephew is a miracle baby. My sister and her husband have been married for 15 years. They have gone through the terrible loss of three miscarriages.

What is really touching is how he has impacted my sister and brother-in-law with care and concern all through the pregnancy and beyond. He is a "Mr. Mom" with heart!

And don't forget about your journaling. Use embellishments around it to make it one of the focal points of your page.

I encourage you to make more layouts about people that have impacted your life in some way. The kit has wonderful paper and embellishments that will make your page special for years to come.

Behind the Art with Jen Matott

Hi, Jen here again to share another layout that I made with the Empathy kit!  This one has a lot of meaning for me and probably doesn't make much sense looking at it if you do not know the story behind it.  So let me share with you...

The journaling only tells a tiny piece of how lucky I feel working at my school.  I am the art teacher there and I teach kindergarten through 6th graders, about 475 kids in all.  I have been there 5 years and taught in 2 other buildings prior to that for a total of 15 years teaching art! 

Around Thanksgiving this year, one of my current students and her family were in a horrific car accident.  A man, who was on multiple drugs, crashed head-on to their car.  They were returning home from their youngest daughter's 2nd birthday party.  The mother was killed in the crash.  Olivia, a 5th grader at my school, was severely injured along with her little sister and older brother, who I also had as a student a couple years ago.  The father was injured as well but the worst injuries were sustained by Olivia.  She was paralyzed from the waist down with multiple surgeries to correct spinal injuries as well as other severe injuries.  We were all horrified by this tragedy.  Our school is a tight knit school.  We are a caring community of teachers, parents, administrator, and students. We met and brainstormed ways to help this family, not just immediately but in the future too.  The photo in my layout is of our brainstorming efforts.  Assigning jobs, visitation schedules, and organizing help for the family.  Teachers banded together and took turns visiting Olivia and her family in the hospital each day.  Teachers would sit with her during her long evenings, read to her, talk to her. Kids immediately wrote Olivia get well cards, drew pictures, made rubber band bracelets to sell in order to raise money for her family.  Recently, her classmates and friends began to be able to visit and help make her smile!

It's been a long road this past month, but Olivia is doing so much better.  She even wiggled her toes on one foot recently!  We have a network that updates everyone when a teacher is at the hospital so that everyone knows how Olivia is doing and what is needed. My art club kids made ceramic ornaments and I brought an artificial tree up to decorate with them for her.  She smiled and was so happy to see symbols of her friends love and support.  I was happy to have contributed to making her stay there a bit more bearable.  She has a long way to go and a lot of hard work, emotional pain, and physical challenges to overcome but she is a strong little girl and I have no doubt that she will be okay.

This sharing and caring is unique to my school.  We have the most generous, caring, and loving teachers, staff, kids and Principal.  I am so very thankful for my luck in being placed in this school.  It's more like a family than a workplace.  

Behind the Art with Jen Matott

I am beyond thrilled to be back on the Scrapbooking From The Inside Out DT again!  It's such a wonderful family of artists and I'm honored to be back! It's like coming home...

So, as my first month back, I am going to share one of my Empathy kit projects with you and tell you a bit more information about my process here.  My layouts this month have a bit more behind the scenes info that needs to be shared.  The stories are personal and meaningful to me.  I love the whole guiding principal behind SFTIO.

 My layout "Tough Love" started with my thoughts on how I deal with tough situations that require problem solving and how I look at others who complain rather than act.

 It all started with this thought... "Do not let the world make you cruel" that was spray painted on the wall in an elevator at Syracuse University's Visual Arts building.  I was taking an encaustic painting class there last spring and everytime I rode the elevator, I saw this phrase.  At first the red made me think it was a negative statement but as I thought about it, I realized that it seemed to call to me.  I can be hard on others when I think they are being less than what I think they should be.  For example, my husband has had a job change and it's very different than what he was doing (and loved to do), but it's a promotion of sorts.  He has complained about changing for almost a year now.  It's become more of a whining and less of anxiety about a new position.  Mostly it's when something is difficult or change is occuring.  I used to be sympathetic and listen but now I'm annoyed, tune him out and snarky.  I get sick of hearing his complaints about a decision he made a year ago!  I feel bad later but sometimes tough love is what people need.  I can't keep encouraging his "what if" mindset.  He needs to move on or find a solution rather than whine about it.  Often in school, I feel this way with students.  They stall, whine, and try to manipulate me into doing the hard stuff for them.  I rarely give in to it.  Often I sympathize with them and try to boast their confidence but often it comes down to tough love.  Give them to the tools and walk away... let the person decide to do it on their own and 9 times out of 10 it is successful!  They get a boast from accomplishing something difficult for themselves rather than being coddled.  I don't do coddling well...

Here's the process for the art part of the page:

 I used texture paste or light modeling paste through the stencils using a palette knife. Kind of like frosting a cake.  Just make sure you life the stencil straight up to avoid smearing the paste.  It dries hard, but flexible and then can be painted over.  Make sure the wash you stencil right away to avoid the medium drying on it!

 Here is what the paste looks like when the stencil is removed.  It's dimensional and white.  I love the texture it adds!

 Then I made a Gelato spray with the gold and silver Design Memory Craft Gelatos.  I have a tutorial on how to do this on the Faber-Castell Design Memory Craft blog.  Just click the link and learn how to do it!  It's fun to make your own sprays. I  combined the gold and silver together to get a bit of a muted gold.   Spray on and let drip down by holding the page upright. You can spray with some plain water too to get it to flow more but it will dilute the color a bit.

 Some of my journaling reads:  I am not a warm, fuzzy person.  I can come across as bitchy or standoffish to some.  It's usually a defensive mode.

Tough love works when someone just won't act without a good reason to... you will not get empathy from me if you constantly complain about the same thing without action.

It's not that I don't sympathize with someone's plight, but I just cannot enable status quo behavior.  If something is bothering you or is in need of change to make things better, ACT, don't complain about it!  That's just how I roll!

I love the embellishments and papers in this kit!  They inspire me to make fun, artsy pages and I hope you enjoy them too!  Happy New Year!