The Meaning Of… Happiness

Hi everyone, how’s your weekend been so far?  Good I hope!  Mine has been interesting, not least when the Carbon Monoxide monitor went off last night while I was upstairs working on this page.  Kind of ironic that this page is called the Meaning of Happiness when last night I was really not all happiness at the end of making it, going downstairs to discover the monitor beeping as it had never done that before.  So now the heating is off and the windows are all open to clear the fumes and I have multiple layers of clothing on because we are in a cold snap and the temps are low and icy.  But anyway, we may be cold but at least we are not poisoned!

So moving on, and thinking happy thoughts, here is the background to this page:

This month, the theme on Art Journal Journey is “The Meaning of…” and it continues to inspire me because it is so open to interpretation so as I was making this page I was thinking about the meaning of happiness and perhaps the meaning of happiness is working in my journal?

At the same time, the theme on Kraft+ challenge is “neon” so I knew I wanted to use my neon paint markers on a page, didn’t have to be the same page, but it just worked out that way – funny how things come together sometimes.

And finally, I signed up for Life Book 2021 and as part of that, there were some PDFs in the virtual gift bag that accompanies the course, and I decided to print them out.  Unfortunately they printed out at a HUGE size and so I ended up with a page of stickers that looked like this (on the right) instead of what I wanted (on the left).   So glad I only put one sticker sheet in the printer or I would have had multiple pages at this huge size lol.  After a bit of tweaking, I ended up with usable stickers of the right size.  BTW if you used a sheet of sticker paper that was A4 or Letter sized sticker it would have been ok and I could have cut around them and possibly used them but I used a sheet of round sticker labels so they are not usable as stickers – you can see the label outlines in the word CAPABLE below.  So I could have  sticker that said CA but not very useful haha.

So that meant that I still had these BIG sticker “mistakes” and I wondered if I could use them for something.  I feel that I should slap the I AM CAPABLE half sticker on a t-shirt or something just as a reminder haha but I probably won’t.  The HAPPINESS sticker is the bottom half of “I choose happiness” so I thought maybe I could use in my journal.  I can’t peel it off as a sticker since it’s a sheet of little sticky labels so I would have to just cut around the shape and keep the backing paper attached.  So that was it, I would make a “happiness” page based around that giant sticker and see what developed.  I spent some time experimenting with my paint markers to see what would happen and I like this very graffiti look that appeared.  Very splattery – I love it!

After adding all my splatters, I glued the happiness half sticker on the right side of the page and did some decoration of hearts in black acrylic.  Then I did some journaling around it in white pen.

I chose three of the right sized stickers to add to the left hand side of the page.  I really need to take better care of myself and one of the reasons for signing up for Life Book 2021 is for that very reason.  I need to spend more time on self-care especially after this year, which has been so hard for so many reasons, some of which I can’t bring myself to talk about yet.

Another inclusion in the goodie bag was a Guidelines for Self Care PDF so I also included some of the statements from that on my page.

I have plenty stickers left over for other pages or I might also use them in my regular journal (not art journal) journalling.

Last thing to do was add this page to my little handmade journal.  This is the one I am trying to finish before the end of the year but instead of using a page already in the journal and getting closer to that goal, I just added this extra page so I am not any closer to finishing the existing pages inside lol.

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – December Challenge – The Meaning Of… – happiness is working in my journal, art journaling in general, and new discoveries
Kraft+ – December Challenge – Naturally Neon – neon paint markers
Creative Artiste Challenge #67 – anything goes

Ingredients

My handmade journal (still hoping to fill it up by the end of the year even if I do keep adding extra pages!)
kraft card, paint pens, stickers

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If You Like It Then You Should’ve Put a Bird On It – Art Journal Page