The Documented Life Project – Week 2

The Documented Life Project – The Journal

The Documented Life Project encourages you to make a record of your everyday life. There are many ways to do this, I went with the art journal. It’s pretty simple. Art to the 5th provides an art challenge and a prompt every week. You get to interpret the prompt however you like.

Week 2
Art Challenge – Gesso
Prompt – “The beginning is always today.” – Mary Shelley

I missed the first week of the DLP journal project. I might go back and do it later. The art challenge was to use book pages though. I don’t know if I can do that. I think I’d have a really hard time dismantling a book. Maybe I can cheat a bit and use a magazine. Anyway, this post is about week two!

This quote made me think of starting over for some reason. Maybe it’s because I often mess up with my goals and have to start over again. This means there are a lot of beginnings in my life. My favourite starting over quote is from Anne of Green Gables. “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it.” It gives me hope. If I screw up on a goal today, I can begin again tomorrow with a clean slate. I don’t have to wait for the New Year or even a Monday. There’s no reason why I can’t start tomorrow. I depicted the starting over idea with a sunrise.

The background was done with watered down acrylics. The grass and some of the flower petals are made with washi tape. The rest of the flower petals are done with Neocolour II watercolour crayons. The details are done with gel pens and the writing is in an ebony pencil crayon.

Gesso is something I’ve never used before. It’s basically a primer that you put on the page before you paint. It gives the page “tooth” (texture) and prevents the paint from being absorbed by the porous paper. When I started this page, I didn’t have any gesso. I wasn’t going to let that stop me from participating though, so I started my page. I ended up buying white gesso half way through the page, so I used it as the centers for the flowers.

Progress Report IV

I have to start all over again. With the events of the past week, I have gotten completely off track. It’s been a week since I’ve gone on a run. I’ve been taking time off work for appointments and shock. I also have not been keeping track of what I’ve been eating…plus there was birthday cake. At least I’ve been walking.

I hate starting over again. It’s discouraging. If I don’t want to have to start over in the first place, then I should stop quitting right? I KNOW! Life happens though. You have health problems, your friends need you, there’s birthday cake, and people die. How do you keep going with your plan when all these things come up…never mind when they all happen in the same week?!

So here’s the plan again.

Exercise: Run every other day.

Food: Eat healthy, get the right amount of calories.

Work: Find my mojo.

Psych also gave me homework. What is important to you? This is the question my he wants me to answer. He gave me conditions though. It has to be independent of other people. He says my self-worth is based too much on external things, like my performance at work or other people’s opinions of me. He also told me not to pick the question apart, to just answer it. What immediately comes to mind is does he want me to say what IS important to me, or what I WANT to be important to me? Those are two very different things. For example, what IS important to me is pleasing other people, making them happy. This is dependent on other people though, so I’m not allowed to answer with that. I don’t know what else I would answer with. If the question is what do I WANT to be important to me, that’s easy. I want to my career to be important. I want learning more and being challenged to be important. That’s not the way it is though. I find myself caring less about the things I want to matter every day. Plus, I’m picking apart the question, just like he asked me not to.

What is important to you? How would you answer this question? I need some ideas.