A Very Special Challenge at Scrapping The Music...

My Book of Days entry this Monday was inspired by our current song challenge at Scrapping The Music.  This challenge has a very special story behind it.   The song was submitted to us directly from the artist himself; who was inspired when he found Scrapping The Music by chance!  I let him tell the story himself at the STM blog - here's what he said...

Hi Music Scrappers,

My name is Dave Erdmann..I was finishing up my latest cd and needed some "artwork" for the sleeve.  I found a wonderful fiber artist artist named Sharon Wheat  www.sharonwheat.com ...

I was mesmerized by her work and started digging a bit to find more.....Somehow a link called "Scrapping The Music"  popped up and while skimming the site I noticed a series of "challenges"  for the participants....Find some inspiration in music and throw that on a visual image..fascinating....Real people, real emotion and creation for the sake of the artistic process......

I am a songwriter and I am inspired by people that "Try Everyday"....  The inspiration for the attached video was the "saga" of America's most decorated alpine skier Bode Miller.  He has been up & down, criticized, judged....through it all, he has persevered.  He was deemed "washed up" and all but dismissed by his coaches, peers and the US ski federation.. Then last season he crushed the competition on Americas toughest downhill ski course The famed "Birds of Prey" in Colorado. 

How cool is that?  Check out his video:


To see what the other designers made, and find out more about Transistor Rodeo, click here to go to the challenge!  We would love to have you play along with us!!!

Here's the journal page I made that was inspired by "Try Everyday..."

This journal page is a promise I have made to myself to to create everyday.  Sometimes life gets in the way, and it's easy to just let the things you love doing fall to the wayside, but I know that I am happiest when I am making art; so I make it a priority to Make Art Everyday.

Here's how the page looked with just the first light coat of gesso on it...

 I almost didn't want to cover this one up cuz the papers were so pretty, but it wouldn't work with the theme I had in mind, so on went the gesso!   You can still see a little bit of the patterns sticking out around the edges of the page.

I'm sorry I didn't have time to take photos of the process, but here it is in a nutshell...
I thought it would be a good time to experiment with some Stabilo water soluble pastel pencils that I haven't used much to lay down the stripes of color, but I found out that they don't work well at all over gesso, so I went with inktense pencils; and those things are indeed inktense!!!  If you want a vibrant set of watercolor pencils these are indeed the ones to get!  I used them for all of the color in the background except for the very top where I wanted it to drip.  The blue and purple are Color-Shine sprays.

The word "art" is painted with gesso, and the word "everyday" is hand-drawn and cut out of dictionary paper.  The bird is a print-out of a sketch I did awhile ago.  I just cut him out and pasted him down with white glue.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

P.S. I just got this book in the mail today and it looks fabulous!  Lots of tips and techniques by various art journalers and their styles are all different.  Very fun!

One of the artists featured is Julie Balzer, who I am a huge fan of.  You can read more about the book on her blog here.

I hope you are having a super groovy week my friends!  I can't believe it's Friday tomorrow already, can you?  Eek!

Thanks for visiting!