It's April!

Hi everyone. Happy April to you. Just so you know, there's NO April fools jokes in this post. Smile.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe we will all actually have spring this month.  (And not to forget my southern hemisphere friends, I hope you get a lovely autumn month.)

 Before I get to April's business, let me once again thank Valerie for her fun March theme at Art Journal Journey. I'm thrilled so many people decided to create a journal page to join her and all of us at Art Journal Journey. I really enjoyed seeing what people created when they weren't confined by a particular theme.

For April, I want to welcome another of my Art Journal Journey co-administrators as our host this month.  You probably know the clever and talented artist Elizabeth  as well as her artsy feline sidekick Bleubeard. And if you don't recognize their names, you probably recognize  their blog Altered Book Lover.

Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's theme this month is 

RECYCLE, REPURPOSE, REUSE

Here's my first page for the month.

My inspiration for my page was the simple-safe-sustainable sticker that came on a new water bottle I received for my birthday last month. I was able to peel it off and reuse it.

 I started by using watercolor paints and a bit of stamping on a page in a bound journal. Then I added 2 scraps of blue and white  paper.  I've been thinking a lot about gardens lately (especially since it is getting close to the  time I can get out into mine ). In many ways gardens are the ultimate in recycling since so many living things benefit from them. You might get beautiful flowers or yummy things to eat, pollinators  get food, habitat is made for other living things, and even the plants in the garden, as they die, will be broken down into nutrients to enrich the soil for bacteria, earthworms and other plants to use. And there's many more benefits to gardening that I haven't mentioned here.

I chose to add this image of the girl with the flowers to be my other focal point.  This smiling girl was in my pile of ripped out magazine pages. I wanted to recycle as much out of the magazines as I could, so even if this girl is a bit more cutesy than I would usually pick, I picked her because she works great with the theme of my page. What I liked about this image is that the girl is doing some gardening. I added some details to her with pens and markers. I also die cut the leaves as well as the loopy border underneath her. The red paper heart was sitting on my work table as was the repeat word. I thought using the word repeat worked great because it also goes to the heart of what recycling is.

To finish off my page I added various pieces of washi tape. 

I hope you want to recycle, repurpose or reuse items and include them in your art. I also hope you will join Bleubeard and Elizabeth as well as all of us admins over at Art Journal Journey by linking up your journal pages.

We love to see your art journaling of any kind, but please remember, no cards, tags, ATC's, or other types of non-journaling art.

Have a wonderful start to the new month, and I hope you're inspired to do some recycled art journaling. It will be fun to see how every recycles, reuses or repurposes items on their journal pages.

And just as an FYI, I may not be able to comment on blogs right away. I'm off on a  morning flight today to North Carolina to visit a good friend. She and I are heading off on a road trip, and I'm not sure how much time I'll have to blog. I'll be home Wednesday night, so later next week I will do any catching up that is needed. I do have a couple of other posts scheduled, one for the new Try It on Tuesday challenge and I figured I'd also schedule my monthly book post while I was gone also. And sorry Elizabeth but I'll be missing T Day and Second on the Second this month. 😞

I look forward to seeing what everyone's been up to when I return also. 

Thanks for visiting my blog and have a great start to April.