A message from The Powers That Be

 Just lazily and mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, one meme, another meme, a third and you're like, wait... are you trying to send me a message here? 

So now I leave the same message here for you, if you are reading this post. Are you listening? I know I haven't been!

Be a Unicorn.

 Time to cover up another journal page I wasn't happy for. Actually, it was over the top of the male version of the female with the fruity headpiece I did a few weeks back. I didn't end up taking a photo of him before I gesso'd over the top. All I knew was, I needed something bright in my life. So I got out the Mont Marte neon paints and did this background. You can vaguely see the dude underneath if you look hard enough.

Now originally I wanted to do some black punchinella dots but I couldn't find my punchinella stencils so instead I went with my next favourite for dots... bubbles! But what better way to make the neon colours pop than to put some deep, dark, black contrast over the top!

A friend I met by joining in Effy's blog-along recently has given herself a challenge to use her washi tape. Being a lover of and collector of but rare user of washi tape myself, I decided, stuff it I will use some washi tape in this one. I found these most divine washi tapes awhile back that I barely dare to use because they are so precious but I popped them on this spread because if I use them in my journal, then they will always be there for me to look at later on the page, right?

Oh and I forgot, after I put all that black down, it felt just a little too dark, so I got a lettering stencil and popped some white down over the top along the right edge and squished some onto the middle of the page. The dude was still standing out too much for me so I thought that might help hide him a little better. When I got to this point, I realised I had recently coloured the cutest little rainbow unicorn girl digistamp with my copics and she would go perfectly on this page.

I started with just some light simple laying down of the rainbow to see how it would all fit before adding her horn colours and skin tone, which is interesting because skin tone is usually the first thing I do on my digistamps. I think I was just too excited to give her rainbow hair so I jumped right into that!

This is how she ended up in the end, I outlined her with my trusty black posca pen. When I decided to put her in the spread though I actually decided to fussy cut her! I don't normally, it's far too much effort and far too much precision is needed. In case you don't know, I'm probably the laziest artist in the world. It's why I don't do hyper-realistic stuff, it just takes too much time and I get bored super easy. I think that is also why I love copics, you can get a really beautiful effect without having to spend hours on it! So after fussy cutting her I pasted her onto the page.

See! She is totally perfect for this background. Typical Samm style though is I had to then find some kind of quote to put on the page to finish it off. So I googled Unicorn, Be Yourself, Rainbow quotes and this is the one that appealed the most:

I think it appeals to me so much because I often feel like no matter where I go, no matter what groups, what like-minded people I find, I am yet to find the place where I truly fit. I have parts of me that fit in all sorts of places but I only fit to a point and never fully. So I struggle with that sometimes because sometimes I just want to truly belong but at the same time you know what? I like being a unicorn in a field of horses.

The only real difference between this last photo of the spread and the one before is I put my usual dark border around the outside of the page and around the outside of the digistamp to lift her off the page a little. Otherwise, I'm calling this one done.

I was going to put this on any of the arty blog challenge pages because I didn't think it met the criteria but it occurs to me now that this piece has more than 3 different mediums used in it so it does actually fit More Mixed Media's and Creative Artiste Mixed Media's criteria. While I'm at it I thought I'd also share this one on the A bit More Time To Craft challenge blog as well! 

So here it is another Mixed Media Art Journal page from a Unicorn wandering around in a field of horses.

The language of me

It has been a few days since I blogged. I've had a rough week or two where I've felt like I've barely been holding on but I've slayed some things from my massive and sometimes scary to-do list so I feel like I might be coming out the other side of things. I still have a few big things looming on the horizon that I would rather avoid but for now I think I can manage. This level of maintenance has now allowed me to do another blog post. 

I wanted to get in at least one more journal spread for the Art Journal Journey theme of Language that the lovely Elle of Empire of the Cat chose. I also made sure it was a mixed media piece so I could share it with the peeps over at More Mixed Media Challenge. So I invite you to watch as I change another previous spread I was not happy with into a piece that speaks to who I am using the language of the Zodiac and where each of the planets in our solar system were sitting, including our beautiful warm, dazzling star and moon, the moment I was born all those years ago.

This was the journal spread I covered it. It's not that she isn't lovely and peaceful looking and it's not that I hate her, it's just that I never got around to finishing her and I started her... at least 5 years or more ago. So rather than having a finished page in my journal, a page I had no desire to finish, I thought I'd just cover her up with something I love instead. She will always be there, underneath it all, so it is kind of symbolic in a way. She is me from many years ago but a new me has emerged since then.

As I've really been enjoying using the paper from this particular book and it so relates to the theme of language I used it again. This time I didn't rip it up though, I just cut off the white edges and glued in the pages whole.

From there I laid down some Koi's watercolour here and there to try and pull of a galaxy like Elle did for her first journal page for this theme. It's not something I've done before so I admit to not having a clue what to do. I'm not exactly a watercolour user all that often. I much prefer my alcohol inks and acrylic paint and if I'm going to do watercolour, I rather watercolour pencils but I felt like actual watercolour paints were what was needed for this.

Then I remembered that I have those metallicy pearly watercolours and I'm so sorry but I have totally forgotten the name and brand and of course they come in little tiny bottles with zero branding on them at all! They are gorgeous though. So I added a bunch of them to make the paper all shiny and pretty, you can kind of see the effect in the dark blue at the bottom of this photo. Then I used my white posca pen, got it all juicy and just flung it at the page to create dots and streak marks across the page.

Here's a photo of the shiny watercolours, maybe someone else recognises them and can put the brand in the comments cause I'd love to buy more when I run out eventually!

If you've been following my blog at all you would know that I am in love with digistamps, especially those from The Paper Shelter who have recently brought out a series of the Zodiac signs ::fangirl squeal:: So that called for me to do a spread of my personal Zodiac that tells the story of me. The very unique language of Samm. The biggest one, Capricorn, is my sun sign. In place of Earth I put my Taurus rising sign and above that my Libran moon, otherwise if you follow it around from the sun it shows what zodiac constellation each of the planets in our solar system was in at the very minute I was born.

Normally I colour digistamps in with Copic, that's just my preferred medium for them but I decided to try something a little different this time. I decided to use my Derwent Inktense pencils. Unlike what I did in THIS post, I kept all the backgrounds the same, I did all the skin tones the same, all the hair colour the same and used all my favourite colours. Why? Well, because every single one of these Zodiac represents a part of me. They are all me in different aspects of myself, governing over different parts of my life from the way I relate to friends, how I relate to lovers, my stubbornness, my sometimes indecisiveness, my deep unconditional acceptance, it all shows up in this Language of Samm.

I decided to use my Ceramcoat for the skin rather than the pencils though, not for any particular reason, just as a point of difference maybe and, well, because I love the brand.

Once I had them all coloured in and the borders done I added some white dots with my white posca pen around the outside of each one and a trail from the sun all the way around to pluto.

Lastly, I added some lettering "The LANGUAGE of the ZODIAC ~ a personal story" and it is done! I'm so happy with how it turned out! I love it a bajillion times more than what was originally on these two pages. I feel so connected to this as it truly is a road map to me of sorts... or perhaps a star map to me. If one were to bother to learn about each planet and what the zodiac traits are, they could know a great deal about me via this spread. The only aspect it's really missing is what planets sit in what houses but that's far too complicated for a journal spread for someone who only knows the basics of astrology. 

I love it so much though, that I want to do one for each of my kids. I am even considering doing an online course on it or something. Perhaps not using digistamps but coming up with our own representations of each zodiac. Something to think about I guess. I hope you enjoyed this journey into the Language of Samm!

FYI: I am not affiliated with any of the products mentioned, I just love them all. They work really well for me and I can use them to my advantage. 

In Joy!

How do you go back to normal?

How do you go back to normal when a piece of you has changed so irrevocably? When an integral part of you has shifted, altered, rearranged itself? How do you go back to normal when you are so forcefully and willingly propelled into a new state of being?

I can hear voices in my head saying, you don't. You don't go back, never go back! What if, though, in your journey of change, in your journey of being propelled forward into new ways of self-expression, new forms of bravery, new ways of being in the world, you find that you still have to have your foot stuck back in the old normal? Then what?

I hope you aren't looking to me for an answer because I do not have one. I just spent 5 days from 9 am until just after 4 pm in a Voice and Sound elective for my Uni degree. We explored the psychology of voice and sound, we were trained in how to breathe effectively, we were invited to explore our voice and the different sounds it makes and look at how we make those sounds. We looked at how anxiety can show up in a voice, how depression can be heard, in my own experience being the therapist I discovered what contained or repressed anger sounds like in a voice and what it sounds like when someone is carrying a heavy, heavy burden. It has been such an amazing and interesting journey. I was not ready for it to end.

Yet end it had to. Back to the old way of life I had to go even though I was so deeply and irrevocably changed by the experience. It felt cloying and sluggish to have to go back to doing Medical Transcription when I feel so ready now to step into my life as a therapist. I feel like I found my therapeutic voice and I am ready to use it!

At the end of the 5-day intensive we were to prepare a piece that allowed us to fully express ourselves using our voice and what we have learned. the piece was meant to be about us and our journey but also a story, a message that we wanted to share, something we wanted to tell people. I admit it, I was terrified - or in the words of ABBA "At first I was afraid, I was petrified..." I could not imagine how I was ever going to come up with something in such a short period of time. Then we found out we could sing an already established song or we could read a poem or a speech, a sonnet, whatever spoke to what we were trying to say, as long as we were being expressive.

 As soon as I heard that, I immediately thought of one of my most favourite songs, it was something I wanted to be brave enough to sing for people one day and it expressed a part of who I am. For me, the song speaks to being persecuted for who you are but also it speaks to the beat of our heart going on and that no matter what is done to us, we will go on, we will keep fighting, keep living, keep being our authentic selves.

The presentation was only meant to be 2 to 5 minutes though and this song goes for longer than that. Also, it's their words, their work, their voices and I had to put myself in there. I had to find my own expression. I was so dogged about having to sing the song that it took me until the -enth hour to make it my own. I can get so narrow visioned sometimes. After workshopping it with my teacher though, I realised 1- I didn't have to sing it, I could do it as the spoken word. 2- I didn't have to keep all their lyrics/words, I could put in my own, mix it and change it up and make sure it stayed within the 2 to 5-minute zone, which I did finally. I only practised speaking it once really and I didn't use all of my expression and before we finally went in to begin the expressions I knew I had to scream in one part. I mean really scream, I mean let-out-my-rage-and-pain kind of scream. That was scary enough in itself but to do it in front of 12 other humans? But if I was to honour the brief of what was being asked of me, I knew that was what I had to do, so I did! Holy hell I did.

I am not brave enough to show you, Dear Reader, the recording of my performance because it is confronting for me, to see what I look like. In my head I'm nowhere near as big as I am in reality so watching myself is painful and the thought of other people watching it, even more painful. I am going to keep it though because one day, I hope I will feel safe enough to share it, so show people where I was and then where I am. So let me just say it was pretty powerful, raw and expressive. It definitely met the brief and I even got a standing ovation and it changed me. It dislodged something in me that then fell away. It unclogged a blockage perhaps? I came away from this 5 days different and I can't necessarily put my finger on exactly what it is but there is something different here now in my body, in my being. 

On the way home from the intensive I heard a whispering in my mind. Keep the momentum going, it said. Don't go back to hiding yourself, it said. It's safe to be seen now, it said. It is safe to be heard now, it said. You must start practising, it said. Practising what? Practising speaking, using my voice. I am really good at expressing myself and speaking in the written word, not so much verbally. It's time for me to begin honing that skill, to begin practising that skill. So I made a commitment. I committed to doing Facebook lives! I'm going to start with the unrestricted people on my friend list and as I get used to it, as I explore my voice and what it wants to say I will then open it up to all the friends on my list and from there, from there one day I will do it in my business pages! This is the dream. The dream is that I can speak freely and without fear, that I will learn to steady my voice and my mind will stop going blank and will always know what to say and how to say it. So I'm going to start small but at least it is a start. That first baby step has been taken. I almost backed out. I almost didn't do it. I almost made an excuse and kept myself small and cowering in fear but then I did it. I took a breath and did it. I DID IT! I did my very first Facebook live and people watched it and they were so supportive and cheering me on, showing up for me to help me teach my brain that it's ok, I am safe. 

There is so much to unpack here and I do not want to make this post too long, so I will leave it here. Maybe I will return to it at some point, maybe I won't but for now... I DID IT.

I AM BRAVE
I AM FREE
I AM WHO I'M MEANT TO BE
THIS IS ME!

Drumming and om-ing for the health!

 Day three of my Voice & Sound elective and when I very first saw this elective and decided I wanted to do it, I was no imagining this. Not even in the slightest. Actually, I don't know what I was imaging if I am to be honest. I definitely love it though. It has never occurred to me before now just how important our voice is. From the moment we are born and we use our voice to have our needs met, through to when we are taught to suppress our voices when our parents shhhhhhhhhh us when we are crying, to bigger, deeper silencing that might happen through our lives. It never occurred to me how much we can know about a person just by listening to them speak. You can hear anxiety, depression, you can hear fear, you can hear when someone is used to not being heard, it is truly amazing.

Today, we sat around and had a drumming circle that evolved into an om circle.

I woke up at 3 am with a migraine. Knowing I had to be out of the house all day humaning, I got up and took some painkillers. It was still there when my alarm went off almost 4 hours later. I believe it was coming up from tense muscles I had just under my shoulder blade. I know this seems like a tangent from the topic but it's relevant. It's relevant because after the drumming circle and the om circle I realised, the pain had completely vanished from my head and almost entirely vanished from my back! 

I know we are all just made up of energy particles and that sound is also an energy particle but it still blows my mind that chanting om and by feeling the vibrations of the drums, it can lift acute pain. Imagine what doing that regularly could potentially do for chronic pain? Intriguing idea, no?

Vocal folds anyone?

Today was my first day of a 5-day intensive Voice and Sound elective for my Arts therapy uni degree. It has been amazing learning about the voice so far and how we can tell SO MUCH about a person just by the sound of the their voice. We can tell if they are shy, if they are used to not being heard, if they are unwell, if their vocal folds (also known as cords) are damaged, we can tell so, so much about a person just by listening to them speak. It is truly fascinating.

What was even more fascinating - and probably not for the feint of heart - was this video showing what happens to our vocal folds when we sing:

I watched in both horror and fascination and can't tell exactly how I feel about this video LOL. 

Interesting for me, I'm nowhere near as tired as I thought I would be after a full day out of my house, so that is a good thing. One day down, four more to go!

Practical Magic the book: A review of sorts.

I had the pleasure of seeing Practical Magic on the big screen when it first came out. I wasn't entirely sure what I was in for, I just knew it was about magic and that was enough for me. I fell in love. I think this is the very movie that made me love Sandra Bullock and want to watch all her movies.

There was so much about this movie I loved. The sisterhood. The them-against-the-world feel. The magic. The family bond. The final acceptance from those who previously ostracised them. I love this movie.

It wasn't until many years later that I found out it was based on a book and knew I had to read the book because books are always so much better... right? Life got in the way though and I never got around to reading the book until recently.

Did I mention that I truly love the movie? Well, if you do too and you haven't read the book, then I do not recommend reading the book. Usually, I agree that a book is better. That is not the case with this one. I was actually pretty disappointed with the book. It took me a really long time to get into it and I had to pack away Movie Sally and Movie Gilly and Movie Aunts. I can see the threads the moviemakers took from the book and I am actually truly grateful they created the movie the way they did. I may not have enjoyed the movie nearly as much if it had been truer to the book. 

That's not to say the book is entirely bad although I think part of my struggle was around how it was written. There was no single point of view and it flipped between POVs erratically and constantly. One minute you're reading as though you are in the experience of Sally and the very next sentence you've switched to the reading as though you are in the experience of Gillian. It's disconcerting to say the least. I do not enjoy this style of writing. It's almost like it is written in third person but then it's not. It's like the book can't decide whose POV to tell the story from and it can't decide if it's 1st person or 3rd person or somewhere in-between. There are even moments where it goes from present tense to past tense that left my head spinning.

I love the characters and their traits and personality quirks in the movie, it's what helps make the movie great. I do not enjoy the characters, their traits and personalities in the book. I love how covert the magic is in the movie. I do not enjoy the overtness of magic in the book or rather the way the book eludes to magic but denies its existence at every turn. Part of what I love about Practical Magic is that the characters Practice Magic. In the book, they do not. The Aunts are the only ones who overtly practice magic in the book. I missed the magic when reading the book. 

Once I packed away the characters I love so much and know so well from the movie though, I enjoyed the book more. By the end, I was rooting for the characters and wanting to see how it all turns out. I still just happen to think the movie writers wrote the story better. They chose Sally and told the story from her POV. It is just my preference, I think, that a story is told from one POV at a time and to have that POV be just one or two different characters. I will not read it again in this lifetime; however, I am glad I did read it. I am glad to know the story as it was originally told even if I prefer the Hollywood version of the story. I really enjoyed seeing the piece of writing here and there that was used in the movie or used for inspiration in the movie. I would love to read a book of the Hollywood version with the Hollywood characters and gain some more depth of the movie world, maybe I need to write that myself!

I did get the other two books in the series and reviews seem to like these better than Practical Magic so I'm looking forward to reading them. Perhaps Alice Hoffman's writing skills become more refined. The next one I'm reading is The Rules of Magic and is about the Aunts childhood, so I'm excited to read that. Then the third one is Magic Lesson's and is actually about Maria's life. So while they may be sequels, it seems like they get better each novel and I like the idea of reading backwards in time. 

In closing, if you like to read then I recommend reading the book if only to see how different it is yet still essentially the same as the movie. If you aren't a big fan of reading and you love the movie though, truly don't bother with the book. I wanted to read the book because I was hoping for more insight into Sally and Gillian from the movie. I got some insight into their minds but they aren't the same people from the movie, so it's not really what I was seeking. If you love the movie and you want to read the book though, I strongly suggest you bracket out the movie characters (to bracket out is to put aside, so do not take the movie characters with you into the book) and read the book with new eyes, with a clear mind and create new characters in your head because these characters are nothing like the movie characters.

In Joy!

Either you can or you don't

 Can you draw?

I think most people who read my blog agree that they can because most people who read my blog are linked into this via people who teach how to do art or they are via challenge blogs that are art journal based in some way. So I hope that most people who read my blog would say YES to this, if the only option is YES or NO. There's no qualifiers here. So no, yes but not well or yes but ... *insert qualifier*. Either you can draw or you think you can't.

For those who think they can't, I would challenge you. I would challenge your thought process. Is it that you can't, or is it that you don't?

Can you pick up an instrument that can make a mark on a piece of paper?

If the answer is yes, then you CAN draw. You just choose not to. 

I have often said the difference between an artist and someone who is not an artist is that an artist practices art. If you can put a mark on paper, you are an artist! If someone can tape a banana on a wall and call it art then you can draw one blue line in the middle of the page and call it art too.

Everyone can draw.

It's just that somewhere along the line, many of us were convinced by others that we couldn't and we internalised that until we believed it and it became a story we told everyone. I'm here to invite you not to believe every thought you have, especially not the thoughts that tell you that you can't do something.

I caught myself almost a decade ago now saying that I couldn't draw faces. I couldn't draw them, so I never tried because every time I tried they looked like a two-year-old had drawn them. Of course, they did! I hadn't sought the knowledge of how to draw a face. I just drew them and hoped for the best and sometimes I'd draw one and think oh hey, that was actually alright. I couldn't tell you why it looked better than all the others I drew but it did. 

So when I caught myself telling the story of how I couldn't, I decided to change the narrative. I went to YouTube and I searched how to draw a face and that led me on a journey where I learned different techniques and I learned about where, how, why, I learned the rules and then I practised. I practised these new skills that I had learned over, and over, and over again. I heard once that it takes 1000 times to become an expert at something, so that was my goal, to draw 1000 faces. I'm pretty sure I'm still not even halfway there. 

I wasn't interested in those hyper-realistic faces. I just wanted to draw a face and have it look like a decent face and not like Picasso had done it... unless of course I felt Picasso-esque that day. Today, I feel confident in drawing a face if asked. I learned the rules enough to break them and still have a face look good. I learned the rules and practised enough that I can draw a face with only a few details or with a lot and I'm happy enough with it. 

Why?

Because I did it. I picked up the mark-making instrument and I put it on the paper and I used it to practice drawing lines until the lines began to make sense. This, incidentally, is also why it irks me if someone tells me I'm so talented. No. Not even a little bit. It's not talent, it's skill. I worked HARD to reach the place I am at. It did not come naturally. I made it happen. So no, I'm not talented. I am skilled.

You just have to decide to DO art or you can decide NOT to do art. Whichever choice you make though, it doesn't mean you can't... it means you can or you won't. 

If you still think you can't draw, then do this exercise with me. Get a piece of paper and a mark-making instrument of some kind.

Now draw an elongated C, like this:

You already know where I'm going with this, don't you? And all you've done is drawn the letter C! Next, I want you to draw the number 66 and colour in the circle parts, like this:

All you've done is drawn the letter C and the number 66 and it's already looking like something, isn't it? Next, I want you to put two lines below the nose like this:

I don't know about you but that almost looks like Homer Simpson right there. That's not who we are drawing but it is someone most people will recognise. Next, you can draw a few more lines between those bottom lines, like so:

I can already tell who this is just by this, can you? Next we're going to add some hair, like this:

Surely you know who this is now? I hope so because when I did the jaw, I kind of stuffed it up a little. Part of me wanted to do it all again but I didn't. I have left it the way my hand drew it because I wanted to show that even when you stuff up, it can still look just fine. It also shows that a few slight changes and you can make so many different faces. So let's add the chin now:

Lastly the back of the neck:

You could even add a curved line along the bottom to represent a shirt but voila! Most people, if asked if they could guess who this famous person was, would say Einstein. Even with the bulgy chin. If you followed along at home and you previously thought you couldn't draw, look at what you did. You drew Einstein. If you can do that, imagine what else you could draw if you decided to commit to practising a little bit each day or each week. Imagine what you could do if you went looking on YouTube for free tutorials.

And now, imagine what you could do if every time you heard yourself think 'I can't...' you stopped and thought '... but what if I just try it anyway.'

In Joy!

Zodiac Digital Stamps

I am truly obsessed with digistamps. I like normal stamps but there's something about the crispness of a digital stamp that appeals to the illustrator in me. The part of me that likes evenly inked and crisp lines, the tidiness where there is no errant ink going where it shouldn't. The other thing I love about digistamps is that I can print them whatever size I want. I can have one take up an entire A4 piece of paper if I want, or I can have a variance of sizes to fit whatever project I want. I can also print them on whatever paper I want, which most of the time is my Copic blending paper so I can colour them in with Copics. In case you haven't been around my blog long, Copics are my number one favourite medium.

Probably my most favourite shop for digistamps is The Paper Shelter. No, I am not affiliated with them, I just LOVE their stamps!! They are so, so cute and sometimes super detailed and so much fun to colour and they aren't that expensive either. There are plenty of bundles to buy too that help cut down the cost.

They have just brought out an awesome bundle of stamps. The Zodiac bundle! Oh my lordeeeeee! I HAD to have them. Then, of course, I just had to print them out and colour them. Not sure what I'll use them for yet but they will be there and waiting. Perhaps I'll create Zodiac pages for my Book of Shadows and use them in that!

As with most of the digistamps, I tend to begin with the skin tones. I'm running out of ink and I do not have enough money to purchase the refills these days, so my choices are far more limited than they used to be but at least I do have the refills for some of my most favourite skin tone colours.

How cute are these?!!

The stamps tend to talk to me and let me know what to colour in next and what colours to use. Normally from the skin, I would go to the hair and eyes but for some reason, these guys insisted I do the background first and of course, what am I going to do with the background if not colour them according to the zodiac sign's driving element.

I almost forgot to capture a photo of it before I began on the hair, which was definitely next... unless of course you're Leo and the lion is demanding to be coloured before everyone else because look-at-me, look-at-me, I am amazing... isn't he though?! In fact, all the animals were pretty insistent they were done relatively first.

I kind of wanted to steer away from mundane hair. I love funky coloured hair! My hair is so dark, if I want pretty rainbow-like hair I have to bleach the ever-loving crap out of it, which only damaged my hair, so if ::I:: can't have rainbow hair, my digistamp girls will!

Here's all 12 of them with their skin, their hair and the background done and most of the animals done as well. Now it's just the fiddly little bits left, like clothing, jewellery and other things like rocks and accessories.

It actually took quite awhile to get all of these done to this point. Now all that is left is the zodiac symbols on most of them and the frame. As with the background, I'm going to do colours related to the dominant element for each sign, so earthy greens and browns, firey reds and oranges, watery aqua/teal colours and light blue airy colours.

Naturally, being that I am an Earth sign myself, I did the earthy ones first. I decided I would keep each frame in the same colours. It's a bit hard to see but there is also some Sakura glittery gelly roll around the inner edge of the frame in a series of dots. You can see it best on the Virgo one. Interesting to me, is that every single one of them have their symbol within the stamp EXCEPT Capricorn and Sagittarius. So with the Capricorn one I just added it to the background.

Capricorn. The best star sign obviously 😉

Taurus. Pretty good too, this is my Ascendant sign.

Virgo.

Next, I was called to do the water signs.

Cancer

Pisces

Scorpio

Then I went on to do the air signs:

Aquarius

Gemini

Libra

Then lastly, the fire signs:

Aries

Leo

Sagittarius

Then this is all of them together, all done. I love, love, love how they turned out! I am looking forward to doing them again someday and seeing how they turn out next time. For now, I think I will actually put them in my BOS.

Seeing as The Paper Shelter's theme for this week's challenge is 'colour in' I think I can add this to their challenge page even though they aren't on a card or in a journal spread and it's just the colour in process, kind of fits well, don't you think?

Your Next Stamp is also running a challenge. The theme is 'A burst of colour'. I feel like all these guys are definitely a burst of colour. They will be a burst of colour when I add them to my BOS that's for sure!

In Joy!