Cover

Since my first entry in the journal was a self-portrait, I decided to do a second self-portrait for my last piece, the cover. I tried to refer to colors that recur throughout the journal. It's acrylic and digital.

Three new entries

First, my calendar. I thought about things I took away from my class experience as well as what was happening in my life and, of course, with my pregnancy.












Next, I pursued last week's proposal a bit more. Part of that proposal was to dig deeper into my feelings about the pregnancy and my changing life. To that this week, I read Birthing From Within, which I finally got my hands on this month. That book prompted me to consider the fears that I have about the experience of giving birth in a hospital, so I created an entry documenting those fears, using acrylic paint and Photoshop. I hope that I can begin to address the fears in the coming months by calling them out (and talking to the doctors and my husband and etc). I did redact a couple of them because they were a little too personal to share here.









After my "fears" entry I needed to do something lighter. I switched to watercolor, graphite, and ink, and did a few cute little things that reflect some of the maternal and domestic feelings that seem to just keep getting more intense as the months go by.

Sleeping on it

This article helped me understand the concept of random stimulation better. I'm a firm believer in sleeping on things, which is related to the random stimulation approach to processing our questions, problems, and the things that happen in our lives.

I'm completely serious when I say that "sleeping on it" has been one of my foremost creative tools in art school! I've really found that my brain is capable of amazing creativity if I just give it some time to do its thang, so I always try to begin a project early -- even with something as simple as a word list -- in order to give my brain something to chew over for a night or two. But because art school is crazy and sometimes we just don't have eight hours to wait, sometimes instead of sleeping on it, I'll just give it a few hours -- or I'll "shower on it" or "walk the dog on it." Even that short amount of time can help. So many times, I've felt that I overcame a creative stumbling block while washing my hair or something -- when just minutes before I was stumped or feeling uninspired.

Since my theme for this visual journal is my pregnancy, I tried to plumb my subconscious for any hint as to the sex of my baby, which is due in November. It probably sounds cliched and silly. But it's hard not to speculate. It's not because I'm dying to paint the nursery pink or buy a bunch of dumb gender-specific onesies or whatever, but rather it's that it's hard not to want some sign of who this creature is. At five months, there's little to be known -- in a couple of weeks we can find out the sex from the doctor, and we can find out things like, you know, does our baby have a heart defect or something horrible like that? Not a lot else can be known, and much of what can be found out is bad news. So you can see why expectant parents focus on the question of XX or XY!

For a couple of nights, I reflected about my question before turning in for the night. If I'm honest, I'll say that I don't remember having any dreams on the subject or even noticing any new or significant thoughts about it in the following days. But my own intuition on the subject just seems to get stronger and more certain, so I created a journal entry about my own hunch.

Normally I believe that what we call "women's intuition" is really not intuition so much as the result of lifelong training in interpersonal communication, noticing and interpreting others' verbal and nonverbal cues, socializing, and reading between the lines. But I came across this study from the U of Arizona that suggests that pregnant woman's hunches about the sex of their unborn babies are surprisingly accurate. You can read it here, but the gist of it is that 70% of women in the study who said that they had a hunch accurately predicted the sex of their baby. They didn't have any medical info or test results that could have clued them in.

I've had a strong feeling from the beginning about the sex of this baby, and it isn't based on a preference or anything. In a few weeks I'll find out if I was right. ...if I'm wrong, my husband and I are going to have to start thinking of some more names!

The journal entry above, "Mother Knows Best," is oil pastel, dry pastel, acrylic, and digital. It's a belly!

Title page, map, and gathering

Welcome to my visual journal for the Space of Possibility class! This journal will document the second trimester of my pregnancy, a time when I am feeling very reflective and inspired -- the perfect time to make a visual journal. Above is my "title page," an illustration I made this week using acrylic, cut paper, and digital media. I often work with this combination of media in my illustration work (more here!), so I chose to publish my journal online to accommodate the digital element of my work. You can click each image to see a bit larger.

Below is documentation of the "mind mapping" activity we've been asked to try out. It does sort of get the ideas flowing, and mine is suggestive of a tool that I use practically every day as an illustrator: word lists. A word-based approach to brainstorming really works for me, I've found. This mind map actually begins on the right-hand side of the page, ending on the left page with a list of miscellaneous ideas that didn't happen to fit into the other parts of my word web.













The "gathering" feature of this assignment is the one that I struggled with the most. I knew I didn't have many tangible things that represent my pregnancy, so I simply started with what I do have -- ultrasound photos:














And then I decided to create a visual list of the variety of objects that have played a special role in my life over the last four and a half months. I decided to do this as a way of "gathering" these elements into one space. They include many things that don't lend themselves to being pasted onto illustration board, like chocolate soy milk and my mother-in-law's rocking chair. This visual list was done with ink and Photoshop.














Until next time!