The ART of Well Being

Good Morning Creatives!

This month for our Gel Press®  monthly team blog hop, the powers that be decided to focus on one of my favorite subjects: Art as therapy.

We are calling this month’s blog hop The ART of Well Being.

To check out all the inspirational posts from the Gel Press® Creative Team, hop along through these amazing posts:

Ann

 Cindi

Cynthia

Elena

Kathy

Keri

Kitti

Jen

Sandee

Teresa

Gel Press

My thoughts…

When I was contemplating this project, I knew there was a lot of ways I could go.

I do a lot of faith based journaling and projects and I always love a good inspirational quote.

However, this time I decided to be a little introspective and think about what makes me? What are the building blocks of Keri Sallee?

As someone who is a recovering people-pleaser/perfectionist, I spent a lot of my life being a chameleon. Changing my spots and stripes to fit the situation. What little bit I did know about myself, I hid for fear of it not being good enough or being the “wrong” thing.

It took until probably my early 30s before I became comfortable in my own skin and allowed who I really was to be the only persona I presented to the world.

So…today’s project is dedicated to those who are reading this (and those who may never, ever set eyes on this blog) who are still searching for their “real” selves.

Keep looking.

Enjoy the journey.

Don’t share the road with anyone who can’t lead you to your best possible self.

The How-To

For this project, I started with my Gel Press® 8×10 Plate and Deco Art Fluid Acrylics.

I started by brayering green and yellow across my plate and started adding texture with some foam stamps.

Using a paper towel, I dabbed my wet paint to remove paint in a few areas. Dabbing allows for irregular pockets of my white background to show and adds extra texture.

I decided to use a plain white card stock for my background so that my colors would remain vibrant and bold. You can see how removing a little paint by dabbing with a  paper towel adds really abstract areas of white.

Rather than doing a solid color, I wanted my next layer to be almost “color changing.” To achieve this, I added 3 colors (orange, red and blue) in lines on my plate, keeping the colors separate.

To keep my colors from blending too much, I brayered horizontally across my plate and then rolled my brayer across a paper towel to remove some of the paint before I went to the 2nd color, allowing them to overlap just a little bit. I repeated this step for the last color.

The Gel Press® Creative Team was recently blessed with some BEAUTIFUL stencils from Stencil Girl Stencil Products. One that I received was called Modern Tree Stencil and I couldn’t wait to use it for this project.

I lifted my image through my stencil (I apologize…I didn’t get a picture before the next step.)

{Invision a cool picture here!!! LOL!}

Next, I grabbed my Gel Press® Petite Set A so that I could use my small circle plate. Using a brown DecoArt Fluid Acrylic, I painted the edges of my plate, adding just slightly more to one side to create a shadow.

You can see that I left one of the pieces of plastic used for storage on my plate. This is so that I can then “stamp” my plate to make my “bubbles.” {dirty bubbles? LOL!}

In total, I added 5 circles.

I then added white to the open spot and blended with my finger to finish up my “bubbles”

To finish up, I loosely outline my tree and bubbles  with a thin paint brush and DecoArt Fluid Acrylics in Carbon Black and added words to the center of my page.

Digging a Little Deeper

This project was all about “What makes me…me?” so I decided to document that question in the center of my page:

For each of my “thought bubbles” I thought about what was important to me and added each of them to my bubbles with DecoArt Fluid Acrylics in Carbon Black.

Creativity- This one seems pretty obvious. 🙂  I have always loved being creative whether it’s with writing, cooking, art, music…if it’s creative…it’s in my wheel house. Not that I am GOOD at all of it, but I have a deep love and appreciation for all types of creative endeavors. If I go an extended period of time without being in my studio, Keri becomes a grumpy girl.

Friends- I wouldn’t be me without my tribe. Those who surround me with unconditional love (the heart), warmth on my darkest days (the sun) and are my anchor to reality and normalcy during the storms of life (the anchor.)

Family- My family is very important to me. Many of you might not know that I am adopted and even though I didn’t find out I was adopted until I was 21 (yes…you read that correctly…I was 21 years old when it was revealed that I was adopted, but that is a story for another day), there was always this feeling of abandonment. I never want my kids to know that feeling. Sometimes I feel like I overdue it and try to be the “super mom” to the point of exhaustion, but it’s a small price to pay for my 3 kids (2 girls and 1 boy represented by the little stick figures) to know that I am always there and how important they are in my life.

Faith- I am unaplogetically a Christian. And although it is not always “PC” to be one now-a-days, since I became a Christian at 17, the words of the Bible and other Christians have brought me through some very rough seasons. Yes…there are a lot of “rules” in the Bible, but the greatest are these: Love God, Love People. My faith has taught me to love all people, even those I don’t understand and who are vastly different from myself.

HOPE- Something I didn’t always have. I’ve gone through a few seasons of life where I didn’t know if I wanted to be on this earth anymore…where I didn’t know if I was worthy enough to live another day…or if anyone would miss me if I wasn’t here anymore. Through my faith, my tribe and, I’m not ashamed to admit, counseling with a  trained professional, I no longer struggle with those dark times. I’m not saying the thoughts are there or that hard times don’t come, but I’ve learned to cope with them in different ways than I did in the past. I have HOPE.

You can see under the “H” there is a semicolon. If you’ve never heard of it, there is a project called “The Semicolon Project” and it is used to raise awareness for suicide prevention.

Their tag line is so powerful:

A semicolon is used when an author could’ve ended a sentence but chose not to.
You are the author and the sentence is your life. 

I make my choices now to choose hope…to continue the beautiful story of my life where once darkness tried to force me to put a period at the end of my sentence.

{You can read more about The Semicolon Project here.}

Closing Thoughts

If you’ve made it this far (and I hope you have), you have learned more about me than maybe you wanted to know.

But…that’s what this idea of the ART of Well Being is all about.

It’s about using art as therapy to learn more about yourself and others through the process of creating.

It’s about using paint and paper to express the words in your brain that your mouth can’t seem to get out and into the universe.

It’s about being unapologetically angry when you need to angry…or sad when you need to be sad…or rejoice when you need to rejoice.

It’s about discovering who you are in the world and not being ashamed of it.

This is a good place to start…. Sit down with yourself and the art supplies that speak to you the most and ask yourself what I asked myself: What are the building blocks that make ME…ME?

I hope you will share your projects with me either here in the comments or on my Facebook page: The Creative Life Studios

Until Next time…

XOXO,

KERI