Meditating on the Filled Page - Guest blog!

Hello all! MY name is Debra Eck and I am so excited to be here as a guest blogger - what an honor, and a wonderful opportunity to share my work and process with a new group of friends. I want to thank our hostess Maria for her invitation.

I'll give you a little background about me, I am an internationally exhibited artist and my practice focuses around paper and books. I create everything from gallery sized installations to miniature books. If you are interested in seeing my whole body of work you can take a look at my blog or my website. I teach studio classes and art history at a community college, I teach workshops all over and I am also a curator for a gallery close to where I live. As you can probably tell making art and building art communities are the major focus of my life. In between I manage to sneak in time with my long-suffering hubby of 27 years and our three grown children!

Each year I try to jump start my studio practice with some art journaling, although to be honest it usually tapers off as the year goes on and lots of new work begins frothing up in my brain. This year I am also taking part in the Documented Life Project after seeing it featured on many other blogs I read last year. I am hoping a weekly prompt will keep my journal plodding along into the end of the year.

Maria asked me if I would share my technique for my first spread with her readers - and I am happy to do that! So without further rambling, here we go!

I keep my art journals in old discarded library books which I usually get for free from my large network of friendly librarians (in addition to academic research I am also an avid reader, so I spend a LOT of time hanging out with librarians). The first month of the DLP focuses on overcoming the blank page, and their first suggestion was book pages. I was immediately in my comfort zone because I love to alter book pages. I decimate a lot of books in my "regular" art life, so there are always lots of book pages laying around to play with.

First I started out by cutting out a beautiful ornate border from an old piece of sheet music and laying it over my journal spread. Because my journal is one that is in process it is very fluffy, so I cut the border in half, I was afraid it would tear if I tried to run it across the gutter. Next I lightly penciled in the areas of text that would remain exposed after I glued it down. The last planning stage was to highlight any words that seemed interesting or appropriate to the first spread of the new year, I tried to pick active words. So my pages looked like this...

Next I blacked out the remaining unwanted text with a sharpie, I used a metal ruler and a Bic Z
marker to draw some straight lines down the sides of the text block to make it nice and tidy looking. I left the open spaces in the text blank (uncolored) so that I could use them as additional journaling areas once the border was glued down. Again I used a fine line marker with a ruler to make straight lines. Finally I used a glue stick to glue the border down to the journal, like this...

Now it was time to start actually journaling on this prepped page. I used the Bic Z pen and a white jelly pen, along with a set of cheap Studio G letter stamps and a distress ink pad in fired brick.

I also doodled a design using the white gel pen to mimic the etched pattern on the border I selected at the beginning to tie it all together. I thought the blank gutter looked a bit too stark, so I added a final stamped design in the center. I have had that little stamp so long I have no idea who makes it or where I even got it from originally! So the final spread looks like this.

Not your typical mixed media maybe, but I am happy with it. As I said at the beginning of the post I love to alter pages, so here are a couple more examples of similar work

And this one which is a little different - the same idea, but sewn by hand using cotton thread

Thanks again for the invite Maria! I hope this was useful to someone out there!! Looking forward to following this blog as it grows and seeing all the great mixed media posted here. Happy Art-ing all!