This moonth, as I worked my cycle, I found I had few words and painted as much as possible.  I struggled in the beginning with what and how to teach lunar journaling.

I have journaled since my first “Dear Diary” and drawn in my architectural journals.
I only recently began “art journaling,” the new phrase for an old idea.  In naming it you create it in a new light, make it a something where before it was just what happened when an artist had a journal and doodled or recorded what they saw or what they felt.

Not having the words for the class, I had to fall back on what I do when I am not writing and have the luxury of wet paint near me; I painted.  In painting with watercolors, in working through the frustrations of a new medium (I have far far to go),
I had such enjoyment playing around with my gurls.  AND,
I finally had a breakthrough at the end of the cycle, this image for the Dark of the Moon.  How appropriate!  The Universe never ceases to amaze me!

Why do I say a breakthrough?  I am not a cartoonist, and want to do something I see in my mind’s eye, but I can’t get there from here through will and mind.  Magic must happen, and the magic is when I can know the medium enough to work it (even just a little) and then I play, and my minds stops filling in the cartoon, stops saying, “This is that color, add shadow, make the sea and earth” and drops into a type of play-full-ness and experimentation that allows my hand and the medium to move toward an unknown product.  Then I have that “just right” feeling, an a-hah moment when I see it and feel that it is just as I want it.  At that point I had better STOP and enjoy the finished product.

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please link back to LunarMoondae.  Images courtesy DKatiePowellArt.