An Open Door

Is your door opened or is it closed?  If you have it shut, please get off the couch and release the light.  Our doors should always be open and free for new discoveries.

Don't you love an open door with sunlight pouring in?  I know I do.  It just makes for a sun shiny day. Who wants to live in the dark with all our options closed to us?  Not me.  I want to have all possibilities open.  I don't ever want to shut anything out.

An open door in our lives allows us to learn and grow.  Never shut out what is being shown to you.  Wouldn't you want to know if you could do something better?  We hate criticism, but at the same time we cannot simply slam the door on it.  All the wonderful comments and praise is great.  We all love receiving them, but when we suddenly get the negative, we tend to cringe and feel some anger well up inside.

But what we should be doing instead is to leave our minds and hearts open to the possibility that someone is hollering out to us to change our ways.  They really don't want us to do it for them.  They want us to change for ourselves.

So, when you get criticism from anywhere, look at it as yes, I see my faults and I will try to figure out my own way of improving and bettering myself.  I want to grow and change and be the best that I can be.  You can too.

This is so true for anyone who has ever been a writer or an artist.  You can't just stop at your first best masterpiece and call it good.  We have to keep trying to outdo ourselves and make ourselves refined.  We only get better with practice.  And this goes for anything that anyone wants to do in life.  If you decide to stop and not do things anymore, you get rusty.

I can honestly say I have done this before.  For instance, my drawing.  I kind of stopped for a long time as I wanted to write novels, knit, make paper dolls and anything else I wanted to do.

Now, I'm thinking that I need to continue drawing.  I have to come back to the arts.  And now, with my scrapbooking bug, I think I will be coming back to this.  As I know have all these plans in my head for new designs, new scrapbooking and collage pages.  They most likely won't be your typical scrapbook page.  They will be beautiful.  I've seen some scrap bookers that do some really awesome stuff, or art journallers.

But, in the past I always associated scrap booking with the basic pages with family pictures on it and images of flowers, footballs, baby rattles and the basic scrapbooking pages.

Not the intricate pages with butterflies, words, and well thought out collage pages.  That's what mine will be.

I even started to take my original manuscript for my first published novel and was thinking of paper punching part of it.  I started with the synopsis I had sent a publisher and started to take my scallop punch to it.  It looks neat, but then I'm seeing words in it like killer, rape, sex and lots of other stuff.  So I am not sure if I will be chopping up the manuscript.

Maybe I can just photo copy some pages that have good stuff in it and choose that.

And I would like to try drawing some different things.  One thing I am thinking of is just of hands with butterflies and all kinds of stuff in it.  But I need to slowly get back into it.

And I just never want to close the door on it forever.  That is just a no.  Although, sometimes we do need breaks so we can concentrate on other things we would like to do.  We can't do it all at once.  I wish we could.

I have read about some artists that have stopped creating art for ten years.  I can't remember which famous one did this, but one or two of them did.  I will have to read and see if it was Van Gogh.  For me it has been about two to three years for a real drawing that I create in pencil.  Those ones were mostly of objects in front of me or from family pictures.  I should find the one of my Grammy sometime that I did.  And have the photo next to it.  I can get a good likeness usually.  Or sometimes I don't get it exact but I get my own little image of it that is just as lovely.

So, I will continue.  For right now, I have been sifting through all the artwork to know what I have, to figure out which ones have to go and get ripped up.  Many are good, but some were just starts.  And some I have looked back on and they are okay, not great.

Now, as I look ahead to the future of my artistic talents, I would like to create new and better stuff.  And I want to design.

I used to do the craft shows and people would look at my paper dolls and say that I should be a designer.  Maybe.

Maybe it will be in the form of scrap book pages.  I've never really dived into that.

Well, I did used to scrap book with Sean when he was little.  I still have the scrap book.  The pages are filled with flowers, favorite actresses, pictures of dolls and other stuff.  Maybe I should photograph the pages sometime and share.

But, at that point I was just cutting out the pictures and pasting them into the page.  I wasn't going all out to design my own pages.

I took a 2-D class in college that allowed us to do collage work on some level.  We all had to start with this particular pack of 2-D paper.  It was all just plain colors.  Kind of boring.

I was the rebel in the class that started to break free from the package we had to buy.  I started collecting magazines and cutting them out.  One of my favorite pictures I used was a picture of an old Anais Nin perfume ad.  The photographs were done by Sarah Moon.  I cut the pictures out and used them in my stuff.

I really pushed my teachers buttons and he encouraged us all to push the boundaries.  I think I compelled others to do the same.  For a few of the pictures with the Anais Nin image, I found some colored nylons and stretched it over the image and nailed it to my wooden frame to pull it tight so that you could still see the image, but it looked different.  Then, I also painted over parts of the collage.  I saved all the colors from the magazines.

And I remember the smell of Rubber Cement like it was yesterday and rubbing the access off with this little tacky square meant for rubber cement.

And when I draw, I also love those grocery store Bic pencils and I also love to use one of those kneaded erasers that you can pull and clean up as you go.  And then the blender stubs are great too.  And you can actually draw with the eraser.

A trick to do to, is to apply your pencil or charcoal to the whole page and then you completely draw with the eraser.  We learned that in college.

So to end this, KEEP THE DOOR OPEN.  IF YOU SEE A CLOSED DOOR, FIND A NEW ONE AND OPEN.


Jennifer Jo Fay

July 22, 2012

A close up of one of my favorite designs.  They could also be the inspiration for new gothic paper dolls.

The Mandy doll I got at yesterday's yardsale.  I had an old version of her without the outfit and she was more beat up and had blonde hair.  I loved drawing the doll for a long time and using it in photographs.  I sold her for some money earlier this year and was wishing to have her back so I could draw her again.  I saw this one yesterday and snapped her up for 95 cents.

I want to replenish some of my dolls.  But now, I think I want the vintage ones from the 50's.

Queen Anne's lace near the yard sale.  We were parked across the street near a field of queen anne's lace so I took the opportunity to do some photography.  Queen Anne and the doll.

I have always loved the DOLLS.  I have an aunt that used to say, "Ah...the dolls."  every time I would mention them in any way, shape or form.  And in college, my teachers told me that "THE DOLLS" were a loaded object.

The full image of the doll heads.  I should do more of these for the scrap booking.  Maybe they should be resting on a pattern next time.  I might also find myself trying to draw images from Google Images too from time to time to get a part of the drawing.  Like an image of someone's feet or something.

Maybe I can also get my daughter's to get their hands posing or just their feet.

The old magazine I bought at a yard sale.  I bought two for a dollar.  The guy wanted $1 a piece but I talked him down to two for one where this one was ripped across the front.  And he even had to charge me sales tax and give me a receipt.  And he laughed and said that I wouldn't want the police to stop me and say I didn't pay for one.  Ha ha.  Of course he had to be a Realtor too as it was an estate sale.

Close up.  I think this is my favorite part of the picture.  I just love how her hair flows.

This was one of the ads inside the magazine.  I took tons of pictures for my scrap-booking needs.

My mannequin with a wig I am selling on Ebay.  There's three people watching it.  She came with three wigs and I didn't need all three.  The brown one was messy and I kind of preferred the white one too.  Down the road, I want to get a curly wig for her.

Last week's flowers I picked on my walk on Thursday and when I got back to the kid's house, I picked some hosta's.

Blank scallops awaiting my designs.  And I'm also selling packages of 50 of these on Ebay.  I've been paper punching all week and I now have tons of these.

My mother's old trinket box that has some of my collage pieces in it and the picture is of my nana.  I found the color photocopied image that I had done at UPS years ago and I cut around her last week for a collage piece.

Vintage Madame Alexander Margaret doll.

Another page from the magazine.

I finished sewing up another batch of these last night.  Some of this I ended up doing while my boyfriend was in the other chair fast asleep.  I'm tempted to get a picture of him sleeping.  Maybe tonight.  I had to laugh last night as he was asleep, his cat, Tinkerbell was asleep next to his phone, and his other cat, Rascal, was asleep on the coffee table in front of me upside down.  I did get pictures of the cats and maybe will share some later.

These ribbon ones are necklaces.  I ended up making a whole set for these.  Below are the earrings and part of the bracelets.  I have left the strings on the earrings as later, I need to find my metal earring findings and figure out how to attach them.  And all the bracelets might not be completely done.  I do want to try to sew in some beads later on.

Another page from the magazine.  These are two actors from an old play.

Another picture from the magazine.   This could be cool in part of scrap booking.  It's fun to find new ways to use something old.  There was also some pictures done by Charles D. Gibson.  The magazines were from 1896 and 1914.  The other was Ladies Home Journal.

Another Queen Anne's lace picture.  I'm loving editing my pictures in Picasa now.  I have learned to save them as jpegs so that I can find them easily in my folders.  Only thing I have noticed is that not all the pictures show up in my folder, but I'm sure they are in Picasa somewhere.

My Live scribe pen and the ribbon yarn that I have been using this weekend for a few cabled bracelets.  I got writing in my Live scribe notebook Friday night and I tried to do some drawings with it and maybe some handwritten words for scrap booking.  I figured out that I can't convert to type.  But the person I bought it from has referred me to Script for Live scribe where for a small amount of money, I will be able to do it.  So I might get it going within the next month or so and that will definitely save some time of typing something up I already wrote.

another page from the magazine.