Behind the Art with Felecia

My final share for our month of Perspective is for my Lens of Faith layout.

This is a deeply personal project – on the subject I value as much as my own life – my faith. I believe completely it comes before all other things. I hope that it is evident to others that this faith is the lens through which I want to see all things.

There is a song by Brandon Heath that says:

Give me Your eyes for just one second

Give me Your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing 
Give me Your love for humanity 
Give me Your arms for the broken-hearted 
The ones that are far beyond my reach 
Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten 
Give me Your eyes so I can see

My faith has quite literally changed my life. I’ve struggled with so many feelings of inadequacy…or interestingly enough, being far too much. And as I’ve dug into God, He’s taught me to see things much differently. While I realize that my kind of Faith is not perhaps for everyone, I just couldn't side step this perspective in my own life - how much it affects my life. 

Sometimes, when we get very involved in what others think of us, the fear that we are just not “right” is crippling…and my faith has carried me through that. 

The camera stencil is an amazing symbol to use for the "lens" idea...plus I wanted to use the subtle contrast of the Distress paint against kraft paper. Faith is like that - its a step away from where you are, a different angel, a new understanding of the same situations, the same people, the same obstacles, the same challenges that life presents. The thing is that its one step today and then one step a month from now, and then maybe one step another year after that. You sort of don't realize how far you have come until you look back at the snap shots and see...

I choose to believe that Love wins...I call this my "rose colored" lens...to view life through the lens of love, to assume (and expect) the best possible outcome, to point my feet in a direction and go, dealing kindly with all I meet along the way - THIS is what a Lens of Faith has done for me. 

In all honesty, I hope my life shows this...that people don't have to see a layout to know these things about me. BUT, its revealing to write it down, to expose it for myself and to understand fully how much this is part of who I am.

Do you have a lens through which you either aspire to or actually see the events around you? Has there been something in your life that caused you to step to one side or another of where you were and look again at the world around you?

Behind the Art with Jen

Hi everyone!  I have to admit that I have been so busy lately with life that I forgot to post last week... ** head hanging in shame***... so today you have a double header of pages from me!

First up is a layout that I actually finished first.  It's one that speaks of honesty and intuition regarding my husband.  I just knew that he was a good guy from the first night I met him.

My husband, Matt, is a worrier.  He is not an optimist usually and often sees the flaws in everything.  I am an optimist and try to see the best in most situations.  So, to say we balance each other is putting it mildly.  We clash on a lot of things but when it comes down to certain things we are the ying to each other's yang, the peanut butter to the jelly, the mac to the cheese... well, you get the idea.  He was not my "type"... he was a red head who was skinny and fairly reserved.  I usually went for the dark haired, bad boy, loud mouth types.  But he was sweet and I listened to my inner heart voice instead of my head.  I'm glad I did.

I had the journaling for this page before I had the idea of how I would use it.  I printed the journaling on vellum paper and knew I wanted to use those little sequins for some fun confetti-in-a-pocket look.

  Here's a closer view of the journaling on the page:

 

 I first added paint to the page and then sewed the journaling as a pocket directly to the page.  I added sequins to the pocket and sewed it up with my machine.  Then I added the chipboard letters in our initials. 

 

 This little love bird trinket was perfect for this page!  I took the "this" clip and added the birds with twine.  A bow made it even more romantic in nature.

 Hearts symbolize love and I had this heart stamp (from Close to My Heart) and stamped it over the paint area.

 

Some puffy hearts over the hanging heart area made this even more lovey!  So cute!  

  

I wanted the paint, hearts, and love text to be peeking out from the strip of paper.  Some of it might be cut off but I just added it for background interest and symbolism.

 

I love this page and all that it means to me and my husband!

Next up is my final page of this month. This one was inspired by a recent workshop I had attended about learning styles.  I remembered the Miles-Briggs personality test and how you are made up of different styles in which we learn or react to learning. Often educators use this to get to know students (or at least we did before Common Core when everyone wants everyone else to learn the same) and differentiate learning to fit their needs.  I am ENFP ( Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving) in my style.  Which is pretty high in intuition when dealing with issues.  Here is a link to the description of ENFP types in more detail.

 If you want to find out what your personality style is try this quiz.  It's amazingly accurate in description.  I made this page to document my style.

 A peek at how I added paints from this kit and last month's kit.  I also traced the mask with a Faber-Castell Design Memory Craft PITT Artist pen.   Instead of using the whole mask, I just made them into doodled circles.

 The clear, vellum pocket was perfect for concealing my journaling on a card that slips in and out. 

So what is your personality type?  Does the description match what you perceive yourself to be?
This kit was perfect for illustrating my personality.

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!