My nature art journal project

I am going to host a nature journal project. It will travel in a Round Robin Style. Every participant will create her own nature journal. It will not be a journal with a nature theme. It will be a nature journal. Meaning you will use it as a journal to record your encounters with nature.
Some SUGGESTIONS for what you can do with this journal:
-Include pressed flowers and leaves you find. You may also record time and location where you found them and identify them using a flora. Maybe describe it with botanical terms.
Since this is an ART journal, you may do this on a watercolored background, or whatever else.
-Journal about your favourite spot. For example, if you have a favourite tree to sit under, try to share this experience with us. Take a photo of your tree, write how you feel about this tree, what it means to you. Share memories connected to this tree. Include leaves from the tree, do leaf printing, do a sketch of the tree, or a watercolour painting, this can be abstract if you are not a good figurative painter, just express the colors of the tree. Include photos taken in the morning and at night.
-Take a walk in nature, document your trip, write about flowers and animals you see, the mood you have, share your photos taken on that trip, include a pressed flower you find beautiful, make an abstract painting with acrylic or watercolour in the colors you saw on your trip, or figurative if you have the skills.
-You can make leaf and flowers pressing by just stamping them on the page with paint. Or you can use them as a negative.
-You can also use magazine images, pages from books, or other images/rubberstamps etc to show what you have seen. But it should be image of something you have seen in nature, not just any nature picture. It should be personal pages.
-Recreate a flower you saw, making a paper flower of scraps…then you can paint the stem, and include real leaves from the flower. That is really mixed media, which I encourage in this journal.
-These are just suggestions to get your ideas started, they are not guidelines.

REMEMBER: This is not necessary a project for advanced artists/crafters. I am definitively not. I have never done anything like this before. But you should be willing to try something new, and willing to experiment, and venture into the unknown. My two passions in life are art and nature, and I am really eager to merge these two passions. Are you too, maybe?

SO, over to the boring rules. It is really important to me that this doesn’t get lost. So I am not taking sign-ups for this project, I am taking applications.
The rules:

1. To be included , you need to either:
-Know me , or rather that I know you and your swapping and communication skills. You don’t need to have swapped with me before, but if I know who you are and I know I can count on you, that is enough.
-If you don’t know me, I want someone I trust to vouch for you.
Anybody can apply to this project, then I will decide if you need a reference or not.
If you are known to communicate badly, you don’t even need to apply.

2. The most important rule of this is: COMMUNICATION. You have to stay in touch regularly. Post when you send and receive. And also discuss the project in general(I will create an own yahoogroup for this project). If you are not willing to discuss this on a general basis, it tells me you are not really passionate about this project. Since this is a long-term project(please think thru the commitment before you apply), unexpected events may occur and you don’t have the chance to work on the journals like you should. That is perfectly okey. Just communicate, and pass the journals on without working in them. That’s much better than nesting on them for months. I need you to commit to let us know if a crisis appear. I know maybe a journal rr may not be first on your mind if you lose someone close to you, for example, but in that case, I want you to commit to spend 5 minutes online to let us know and then pass the journals on. In some extreme cases where you are not able to let us know….if you are ill on the hospital for example…we will be hanging in the dark with questions…therefore… to be in this project, I am going to need your phone number. Don’t worry, I wont bother you, unless you stops communicating via email.

3. COMMITMENT: Think thouroughly about the commitment of this project.. Do you have time, energy and passion for a long lasting project? Also think about money…the journals can be expensive to mail, and I don’t want you to come later and say you don’t have money to pass the journals on. Once you are officially signed up for this project, you are NOT allowed to pull out.(Unless you have a good, valid reason of course) If I accept your application, you are not automaticly officially signed up. I am going to ask you for a confirmation later.

4. PRACTICAL INFO: You can make your own journal, or a store bought one. Start some pages in your own journal. The journals should rotate monthly. Then you have a month/almost a month to make 4-8 pages in everyones journal.
We will have set mailing dates(approx of course). That is to avoid one person receiving maybe 2 journals to work in before she even made her own. That causes stress. So after I have posted the officially and final flight list, the mailing date will be one month from that, and you are not allowed to mail it before that. No one should have more than one journal to work at, at a time.

If I scared you off by all this strictness…that’s okay. Then you are not fit anyway. I want only reliable participants who are all 100% into this going as smooth as possible. And also, if you don’t enjoy being in nature, if you are not at home in nature, if you don’t feel one with the nature, this is not for you either.

SO, come on and email me for questions, requests and applications! My email is : ulvinnen1@yahoo.no



Marthe Syversen