BAJ, Some Strong Messages, and Few Cards

We are moving fast to the BIG holidays in the U.S. - Turkey Day and Christmas.  This year the holidays will be very different!  I am interested to see what happens.  I am doing a lot of Zoom and MS Teams meetings in my craft room/at home office so I think I am going to get a tall skinny tree to go behind me so things will look more festive.  Thanksgiving is going to be very interesting as I am doing Whole30...the turkey will be a go, but I am going to have to bring two stuffing dishes:  Sweet Potato Sausage Stuffing and my Mom's old recipe for everyone else. I can see the looks on my family's faces when they come up on the sweet potato stuffing!  There are three semi-ealthy eaters that may venture out and try it, but the rest will turn up their noses and say "there she goes making some weird stuff again."  I always slip a bunch of cooked yellow squash in my normal stuffing and they never know it. Tee Hee!  I am still losing weight a little at a time - down 18.5 pounds since the end of September so I am sticking with it. 

Today I have some BAJ pages to share.  

Following along with Wendy's  **ART*JOURNAL*JOURNEY* prompt, I did another page with birds.

This is Psalms 106 which I have avoided for some reason, but it finally spoke to me this week.  The background was my attempt to do faux marbling since it is hard to dip a large bible page into a marbling mixture.  I did it by mixing some inky water on aluminum foil and plopping it on my page.  The page was coated with Gesso first and then another layer.  I did one final layer of gesso after my watercolor birds and words were written and it blurred some of my letters.  I  still like it.  I put some stickles rays coming from the word Power - you can barely see them in the picture.  I added a sticky note for the verse that talks about God taking note of our pleas.  

My next page is John 4, the story of the Samaritan Woman at the well.  Such a lovely story where Jesus shows us we can all be forgiven and all be used to spread His message.  I love the analogy of Him being living water and I had a water bottle on my table so I just sketched it out and added a little Shadow of him in he bottle.  I showed it to a friend who was studying this passage with me and she said she loved the lady in the bottle - my sketching needs some work!!!  LOL

I did this next page a while back for the Stitch in Time Art Journal Journey prompt, but I hesitated posting it because I don't want to offend anyone who wouldn't like me putting Hitler in this sinking pit.   I accept that everyone has different political views and that we won't all agree on things, but this is how I see this particular person from history.  I also try to stay away from judging the heart of others.  He may have had a heart change at the very end and he may be going to a good place - we won't know until the end.  The fact is that millions died under his direction so the odds are not in his favor....

Did a card this morning really quick adding in a scene I watercolored a month or so ago.  This is going off to a man who is battling cancer but things are looking a bit better for him.  The challenge was to show a scene out a window as this man loves the outdoors.  The papers are Stamperia.  It has a lot of gold paint on it too, but none of it showed up in my picture for some reason.  Too early in the morning most likely. 

And I did a Christmas card this weekend using my last of the inky paper towel background my 5 year old Grandson, Lewis, made me.  I am sad it is all gone.  I so need to get him to make me some more.  I watercolored the tree and then flecked SnowTex all over the card.  The tree and greeting are new from DRS Designs.

I know this  post has a few strong messages in it.  I am aware that others have different views on religion, history, politics, holidays, etc. I am cool with that, and I am not expecting everyone to agree with me.  I am just trying to sharing my art journal and card journey with others who are interested and my personal views show up in my art as they do with others.