Monday, March 12, 2007

Visual Chronicles -- Life changing book!

I discovered this book by Linda Woods and Karen Dinino.

It's published byNorthlight Books in 2006

The full title is

Visual Chronicles: the no-fear guide to creating art journals, creative manifestos and altered books

They have a non-intimidating approach to art journals and show you how to break it down into little steps and that a journal doesn't have to be like a soap opera narrative. Nor does it necessarily have to be in a bound book. It could be in a box, or tied together with an elastic band or a ribbon.

The website is sistersonsojourn.com
and full of neat stuff from the book and teasers about the next one, due out September 2007.

There is an area with a Yahoo group, which of course I joined.

Find I am seeing things differently and perhaps this will give me an outlet for all the ephemera (aka JUNK according to some!) I accumulate so easily and can't bear to discard.

I now have a large sketchbook which is filling up with collage (mostly) artworks, and a box of index cards with prompts, colors, and notes about supplies.


The index cards aren't mentioned much in the book but I am the index card queen.

I have one old box full of housekeeping prompts from when we had a B&B, with chores detailed room by room, creative ideas (hmm I will have to revisit them, some of them must still be good), quotes from the Qu'ran, etc.

Then from my recent years in school there are thousands of cards with notes about medical terminology, spelling, trivia, steno outlines, etc. It's fun to pull out a random card and discover that the original topic bears some relevance to what I'm writing on it this time.

E.g. I found an ice blue card with

ANWR = Arctic National Wildlife Reserve

written on it, and the prompt I was jotting before it escaped was about the heat.

BTW we finally caved this aft and put the a/c on!

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