One More Evaluation from a Participant in the 2014 Celebration: Susan Ernst

Above: A page spread ©2014 Susan Ernst, from her 2014 Fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

This post is coming to you all late because I lost the original missive from Susan. Happily she wrote again to me so I'm able to post it now. Apologies to Susan: searching in my mail program does not always seem to be straightforward!

If you go to Susan Ernst's blog you can read Susan's full evaluation about the complex relationships her "character" had in this year's fake journal. You'll also learn how Susan drew on friends and family,  as well as past projects, to create her full cast of characters. It is always intriguing to hear about the process by which a creative piece takes form. It might inspire you to revisit some past projects for new directions.

Susan's process allowed her to maintain distance from her character, yet still derive insights into her own situation and her own hopes. She admits that some of her creative decisions arose from yearnings she wasn't quite aware of.

In addition, Susan provides a breakdown of what she felt worked and didn't work in execution. You might find this useful when planning your own mixed media pieces, or when organizing your own plans for your 2015 fake journal (you know you want to keep one).

So go check out Susan's evaluation, drop her a note, and start your own planning!

Thank you Susan for your thoughtful evaluation of your project and for reminding me of your evaluation. I hope you'll join in next year too.

2014 International Fake Journal Month Wrap-Up: Michelle Himes

Above: ©2014 Michelle Himes, a page spread from her 2014 IFJM journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

Michelle Himes has participated several times in International Fake Journal Month. In 2014 she joined in with the experiences of a character who plans and reads about gardens. She wrote the following wrap-up at the end of her project—

I had a lot of trouble coming up with a "character" for this year's fake journal, so I went with Roz's suggestion to think of a technique that I wanted to try and then figure out who would use that technique.  

I wanted to try a line and wash technique that Gerald Brommer calls "color independent of line" in one of his workshops. I like how the technique looks, and thought it would be quick and not too labor intensive.   

I decided to use gardens, since it was spring, and gardens lend themselves well to this technique. In hindsight, maybe should not have restricted myself to a single subject, especially that subject, since I do paint realistic, close focused flowers in my real life. 

My "character" was someone who plans and reads about gardens, and works hard to make her garden beautiful—in contrast to myself who never gets around to doing much garden work and must buy flowers at the grocery store if I want to paint them. It was hard to distance myself from my character though, because real flowers and real weather were occurring all around me. Perhaps it would have been better to have placed my character in a different climate—maybe tropical, so that she wouldn't be writing about what was actually growing here. Perhaps it would have been better to have used a different subject matter as well as a new technique, but I was trying to keep it simple. 

I liked and always wanted to try this technique, but honestly, coming up with an image and a quote that would work with it every day was a bit challenging, and I did get bored with it on occasion. I had also intended to put a bit of gardening advice on every spread, but since April is early for gardening in my area, I ran out of things that could realistically be done in the garden—thus the change of location/climate would have helped with this. 

I loved the idea of using quotes though, and plan to use them in my regular journal. And as usual, since I am not a disciplined, every day journaler, I fell behind and did not complete all 30 page spreads.  But I like what I've done with the 24 spreads that I did do, and I would really like to finish the rest at some point.

If you follow the link to Michelle's fake journal blog above, or click on this link, you'll be able to see the other spreads of her fake journal.

I think we can all learn from Michelle's experience—there is a fine line in selecting a character that is close to us but not too close. I think personally it is sometimes better to err on the side of the character being too close so that we can rely on things we know to ease us through the rough patches in the month. On the other hand it is sometimes difficult when you are too close to the character to get the type of distance you are aiming for.

I think the use of the line and wash technique is lovely and I think an approach like this where you take a style and work in it is a great way to experiment with the style in a concerted block of time. I find the pages charming, and I'm eager to look up Gerald Brommer and learn more about his art too. I couldn't find a website for him but there are tons of paintings on the internet of his, and I found this workshop listing from last year with lovely stained paper collage work. 

Michelle also encountered several hiccups that we all may encounter depending on the character we pick and the subject matter he or she might sketch—specifically the problem of April being too early for the types of garden advice inclusions Michelle hoped her character would do.

But what I'm excited about is that in all this she came out of her project with new ideas for her REAL journal. That's one of the best results we can achieve.

Take a moment today to go through Michelle's fake journal for 2014 and think about things you might like to try in your own art. Be inspired to jump in, set some time aside, and go for it.

You can also visit Michelle at her regular blog: Michelle's Watercolors.

One Third of the Way through International Fake Journal Month 2014

Left: A photo of one of my first 10 pages of my 2014 fake journal. I haven't come up with a good way to "shoot" them during April, but I wanted to give you an idea of what I'm doing. The only way I could think to do that was to include my toes for reference. (I wear a ladies size 6.5 shoe.) The paper is about 22 x 30 inches. The bird's head is larger than my head. Brush pen with rubberstamp ink for color—since the paper won't take wet media. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

We are officially past the one-third mark (day 10 of a 30-day month). If you started on April first and have been able to work each day you'll now have at least ten entries.

Congratulations for making it this far.

If you haven't already started and still want to join in, dive right in because 20 days remain and you can get a lot of work accomplished in 20 days.

If you've been working right along now is the time to take a moment to look at your past pages and ask yourself a couple questions:

1. Am I staying consistent with my character? If not how can I fix this? Is there a time of day that's easier for me to get into character? If so make a conscious plan to work during that time each day.

2. Do I see changes that would be great to explore even though they depart from my original plan? If so, think about the impact they will have on your plan and make a conscious effort to embrace the changes if you think it's a good direction to go.

3. What difficulties are you encountering? These can be character problems or time management or media issues. Pinpoint what they are. Brainstorm some ideas on how to deal with them for the rest of the month.

4. Congratulate yourself for making it this far, even if you have missed a couple days. Now keep going.

A Bit About My Progress
My main obstacle this year has been a spring cold which turned into bronchitis. I'm finding it difficult to do some of the experimental work I'd hoped to achieve because I've been relying on my inhaler rather heavily—and my inhaler makes my hand shaky.

I'm enjoying what I'm doing while at the same time I know I have to push myself some more. And I'm also seeing how difficult it is for me to not explain things. My whole life is tied up in explanations—to teach, to write, to interact with people—and it's difficult to shed that behavior. We'll see what happens.

The 2014 Participants List Is Up
If you have been watching the blog you'll see that I'm starting to get the participants listed in the column to the right. Each participant's name is linked to the dedicated fake journal blog or Flickr site they are using.

If they are posting on their regular blog the link goes to the first post for IFJM 2014 and it's my hope they've indexed their entries well enough that you can find your way around.

If you've got 8 entries in your journal by now and are publicly posting send me such a link and I'll add you to the list. (Be patient if nothing goes up for a couple days as I'm not on the computer much right now. Both the real Roz and my character are trying to "rest.")

Check out the other participants' work and be sure to leave them some comments and encouragement.

Now get busy on your fake journal!

2014 International Fake Journal Project Participants—Public and Private

Public Participation
If you are participating in this year's celebration and you are posting your pages publicly on either a blog dedicated to IFJM related posts or an album on Flickr or some other public digital venue I'm not already savvy you can appear in the 2014 IFJM Participants list in the right column of this blog.

There are already names posted there as you can see. (For past years please scroll down to previous lists which are grouped together at the bottom of the column.)

Participants listed already have all participated before.

If you haven't participated before please write to me as soon as you have 8 days of entries completed. Send a link to your blog or Flickr album where you have them grouped. The email should come to me at rozjournalrat@gmail.com and the subject line should read "Participants List."

I'll check the link out and add you to the list.

The delay for new participants is simply so that there will be something there for visitors to look at. I try to do as little housekeeping as possible for this project so that I too have time to participate.  If someone falls off the project after 3 days or so I might not find out until a long time later. A week of participation is still long enough to even generate a wrap up. (Keep that in mind if you aren't up for a 30-day trial period. Maybe doing a two- or one-week project is what would best suit you. It's a great way to start.)

If you are sending me a link to a post about your first entry to IFJM 2014 on your regular blog be sure that your blog post for that entry includes some sort of wording and tagging along these lines:

This is the first entry in my 2014 International Fake Journal Month Journal. Each day in April I'll be adding a new entry. You can view all my journal entries on this blog as I post them by using this blog's search engine and searching for IFJM [or Fake, or whatever you're indexing it under] or go to the category cloud and click on "KEY WORD YOU'RE USING FOR TAGGING."

You can create an end paragraph to your initial post that explains how people can find your future posts without sifting through the rest of your blog posts.

If you don't include a statement like that in your post past experience shows that people don't return to see the rest of your pages because they can't find them. And if you send me a link and I can't find them I can't assume others will be able to and I won't add it to the list.

We're only 6 days in and if you haven't started your project there is still plenty of time to do so. And there's plenty of time to be added to the list. Based on my guidelines above for 8 days of entries you have until April 23 to start and complete 8 days. If you contact me in the first few days of May when you get your items scanned or photographed I'll add you to the list. People return to the blog throughout the year to look at participants so it's a good thing to get added.

At the end of April I'll start asking participants to do a write up about how the project went for them. Past participants have found this helpful to understand what value they derived from the project and how to plan future such projects. It's also helpful to others who are just reading about the project. There is no obligation to provide a public wrap up write up about the project. In fact if the project becomes emotional or difficult in a variety of ways you might not want to discuss it publicly. But if you do complete a wrap-up post I ask that you send those links in to me at the beginning of May. Sometime around May 10 I post about them and list links to the wrap ups in a single post.

Private Participation
I've written before that IFJM is something you can do on your own and keep private. I encourage that. If at the completion of your project, however, you would like to participate in the wrap up please feel free to do so. I would ask that you send a jpg of one of your pages to accompanying your link in the wrap up post, so people have a sense of what you were doing.

That's all for today. I have to switch gears now and turn out today's page! I hope you're having a great month. I have already found out some fun things I hope to share with you at the end of the week when I have a moment to scan or shoot these massively oversized pages.