Be Careful… Watch the Weights!

visual journal, art journal, accident, collage, mixed media, art

Accidents happen… and when you are a teacher you hear about accidents happening all the time. When you are an art teacher accidents happen all the time, everyday, with paint, water, ink, xactos, scissors, etc., etc., etc. Luckily this page doesn’t refer to an accident in my class… but unfortunately it does have to do with one of my former students…

When something happens at school word travels fast. Sometimes on T.V. you see those montages where someone hears something, they turn around and immediately tell someone else, who runs and tells someone else, and so on and so forth. In school… that really happens. It seemed like not five minutes had passed  after the “incident” when someone barged in my room saying something about an ambulance and a lost finger. It turns out, that the lost finger belonged to one of my babies.

This particular student had been lifting weights in gym and accidentally crushed his finger between two dumbells, and subsequently almost cut the tip of his finger off, only a slight variation from the busy bee’s story. If you imagine Nearly Headless Nick as Nearly Fingerless Nick… that was the circumstance. The student was rushed to the hospital, the tip was successfully sewn one, and everything was hunky dory… Well almost… because he was my student I got the joy of him waving around his deformed finger every now and then. I told him I went home at night and had nightmares about that finger… it was a scary sight…

 I used ripped up red construction paper for a base, then I drew the outline of a hand, and filled it with gesso to make it stand out from the background. I slightly shaded it with pencil, and used a thin point sharpie to draw in the stitches and the curvy thread lines around the page. I used bleeding tissue paper for the splatters. As a reminder if you want to do this you drip either watercolor or bleeding tissue paper color on the page, then blow it at an angle to make it splatter.

As a more experienced journaler I often look back at my early pages and think about what I would do different. Luckily, if you are reading my blog and taking tips from it you can avoid the mistakes I made! If I could go back I would set up the page the same, but I would have down the splatters on a separate sheet of paper, cut it out, and glue it down. The splatters ended up looking messy on this page, if I had done it on a separate page I could’ve picked the best looking splatters. I also would’ve gotten more creative and actually used thread to stitch the finger and the outside of the page. I also would’ve done a better job incorporating the words into the thread, by using neater cursive and writing it bigger. Even though I would change some things, all of my pages are a learning experience, and I have grown a lot from all of the pages I have made!

If you like reading my blogs help me share the word! Subscribe, like, tweet, link, e-mail to others! Thanks for helping me bring visual journals mainstream!


Leave a Reply
