Fearless Friends in Art Guest Blogger Series- Jen Matott!!!

Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic Fearless Friends guest blogger post.This week, I'm over the moon excited to share with all of you, a woman who completely rocks the Art Journal among so many other things. I have the blessing of working with Jen Matott on the Wow Embossing Powders design team and talk about opening my eyes to being free with your art. Once you read the post, you will completely understand why I say that. So without further adieu, Let's welcome Jen Matott and her amazing talents.

I am so honored to be asked to guest post on Erika's blog! She is a super person and artist and I love her humor and style! Thanks girl! I want to share with you some of my pages from an exciting project that I got involved with last year. The Sketchbook Project is a traveling exhibit of sketchbooks designed around a theme. Art House Co-op is an independent Brooklyn-based company that organizes global, collaborative art projects.

What started out in 2006 as a small artist community has now grown to over 60,000 artists online. Their website can be found here "The Sketchbook Project". If you haven't heard of it, you should check out their website and see what other projects they have that artists can participate and collaborate in with other artists.

It's a wonderful mix of artists from graphic designers, illustrators, mixed media artists, painters, amateurs, students, and just lovely hobby artists. I found it when I was looking for something for my high school art students to participate in that went beyond a basic sketchbook assignment. It was a random search that led me to their page. I participated last year with a computer generated theme, "Maps". It was a theme that generated lots of meaning and symbolism for me. I had saved maps for years.... atlases, book maps, local maps, etc... So, the material was there for me to use.

I had just joined Faber-Castell's Design Memory Craft team so a lot of my pages used their product! I had a blast creating it! The only glitch is that you have to give it up... permanently. You send it back to them and it gets housed in the Brooklyn Art Library with all the other sketchbooks for people to view and check out on the tour. I plan to stop in there to see it in person in March when I travel there for a conference.

Here are a few photos from 2011 book:

Those are just a sampling of the pages from the first book in 2011. I did make color copies of my pages so that I had a copy for myself. I also made extra color copies to use in other artworks for collage... thinking ahead.

Fast forward to 2012... I signed up again and paid my $25 for the journal that you get that was made specifically for the project so that everyone has a consistent size and shape. You can alter the cover and pages within. It just has to stay the same size overall. I picked a theme from their list this year of "Writing on the Wall". It spoke to me of images and words, of text, of quotes, of graffiti!!! I KNEW how I would approach this one and I enjoyed every moment of creating it. I used Faber-Castell product, art mediums, stamps, sprays, and collage. It was awesome! I felt free and got it done in 3 days! The other one took me months.

The pages are thick with mediums such as texture paste, gel mediums, gesso, and matte medium. I glued pages together to make thicker bases in which to add the mediums.
Here are a few of the pages where you can see the texture paste built up and stamped into.

Those are just a few places in the book that I used texture. I got so carried away with stamping into the paste that I had to quite literally scrap the paste off and start again. BUT it was therapeutic and fun at the same time! I built them up and added color afterwards.

The final book was a conglomeration of symbolism, text, stamped images, color and texture. I am a huge hoarder when it comes to materials that might find their way into my art. I have a huge bin full of bits and pieces of stuff. My husband calls it junk but I call it collage fodder!

Here are a few more pages in which I use stencils and color.

And finally, here is my cover:

I enjoyed every stage of the journey with this project and it was sad to send it all off to be housed somewhere else, but I love the idea that others will be able to page through it and see my work. I love that it will be part of a traveling exhibit. How cool is that? One of thousands perhaps, but my book is there! I plan to do it all over again next year! Will you join me? I hope that you do

Thank you for letting me share my art with you and I hope you will visit me on my blog for more photos and technique.

Fearless Friends in Art Guest Blogger Series- JJ SOBEY!!!

Hello everyone and welcome to my first post for the Fearless Friends in Art Guest Blogger Series. After going to CHA this past month, I came home with a renewed sense of self. A sense of knowing that there are so many artists out there that are good, real people. The type of people that you WANT to know, WANT to help and WANT in your life.

I couldn't ask for a sweeter, more genuine artist than JJ Sobey for this first post and considering what my guest post on Dawn's blog was about yesterday, I know this post is meant to be.JJ and I (we both believe) were separated at birth lol. Please take a moment and add this amazing artist to your reader, blog roll or network blogs list. Without further adieu, My first guest blogger... JJ Sobey!!!



When Erika asked me to do a guest post on her blog, I was flattered (immensely). I started planning a project to show to everyone here today, and wondering what I would talk about. Then it hit me on Thursday (about 6 hours before I was due to send her my post) that perhaps I needed to go in a different direction.

We need to talk.

The words creative and artistic scare the crap out of me. My teen years were my most creative time – I sang, played piano, wrote music, wrote short stories, wrote plays, was in theatre, and the list goes on. But it was also a very dark time for me – I was fighting a deep depression through all of it.

It took a long time and medical intervention to come out of it. And at the same time I took it into my head that the creativity was part of the problem. I felt that if I shut it out of my life, I would have more of a chance to get out of my depression. So I stopped being creative. I turned my back on the arts, and tried to ignore the creative urges. And I succeeded for a while, and I thought (mistakenly - I was in my early 20’s), that this was what made things ‘better’.

It didn’t make it ‘better’, by the way. Medication for the chemical imbalance in my brain is what made it better. I was lucky though – I was one of the ones who didn’t have to remain on it for the rest of my life.

For years, every time someone ‘accused’ me of being creative, I got nervous. I wondered if they saw signs, which I hadn’t yet recognized, of a returning depression. I would back off from the ‘creative’ activity, and try to hide from art. I would deny that I was creative – it felt like a sentence, not a compliment. Like it was something I should be ashamed of. I feared art.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is something that I struggle with every winter, and it’s just as real as other forms of depression. And it’s hard. Because when I start to feel more creative in the winter, I fear that the full-blown, not-going-to-go-away depression is coming back.

I’m trying very hard to come to terms with being an artist. I’m trying to own it. But it scares the hell out of me – I have so much baggage associated with that word.

Over the past year, I have discovered that I am not alone. Many, many creative people deal with depression – creativity is sometimes a symptom of the depression itself. For many, to receive that creativity means having to also take the depression that brought it on. I now realize that the creativity is not the cause, but the result, and perhaps it’s the universe’s way of compensating a little bit for the pain.

So why did I feel the need to bring this up today? Most people won’t ask for help even though asking for help is not a sign of weakness – it’s courageous; and often those who refuse to ask, are the ones who need it most. But we don’t talk about this – there’s a stigma attached to it, for some strange reason.

We, as artists, and crafters, and mothers, and sisters, and daughters and friends, we need to talk about this. Because you may be surprised just how many people you already know, who are going through this in silence. Embrace their art, and then embrace the person who created it – they might really need your support, but will never ask.

If you’ve made it this far – thank you for reading! Feel free to come visit my blog – I promise that I don’t get on my soapbox very often. J

One Good Thing

Supplies for the layout:

CS – Bazzill
Glimmer mist, glimmer glam, glimmer glaze – Tattered Angels
Gesso – Liquitex
Flowers, trims – Green Tara
Grungeboard, washers, tiny brads – Tim Holtz
Chipboard – Riff Raff
Corrugated letters – Jillibean Soup
Marker – Faber-Castell PITT pen
Other – dictionary paper