This week’s page is my version of the first Life Book 2015 assignment by the awesome Tam herself. It was meant to be the guiding light and I decided to make this angel I’d made a few years ago but only using white and yellow hues.

The text for this week says: choose the light.

There’s something magical, for me, about using white and yellow. Something magical in the shiny pages. Something magical in light. I don’t often choose to follow the light. I can easily get myself wrapped up in the darkness and lose sight of the joy and the light. I like the lantern and I have been choosing to surround myself with more light this year which I hope will remind me that it’s always there, always available to me.

here’s a front view, you can’t really see the shiny:

i love the shine:

Note to self: choose the light. it’s always there and it is a choice no matter how it feels. no matter how i feel. the choice to choose the light is always, always there.

Note to Self is a project for 2015. You can read more about it here.

This page was inspired by Dyan Reaveley’s lesson from Life Book 2014. It’s a simple page and it wasn’t hard to do. I painted the background with all different stencils and other fun things and then I used a human stencil to make them all black and then left one to stand out by using the opposite part and stenciling around the body.

The text says: choose to be you.

Part of being brave, for me, is being wholly myself. Embracing who I am. Not just being okay with it, but fully owning it. Being proud of it. I am always trying to improve as a person. I have many many many flaws. Many.

But I am trying. And I also have many wonderful characteristics, just like everyone else. I want to remember that what I am best at is being who I am. There’s a reason I am who I am and I want to embrace it 100%. I love many other people and I also want to love who I am.

All of me.

Note to Self is a project for 2015. You can read more about it here.

This was another page where I just went rogue. I wanted to do something different from Tam’s lesson. I didn’t know what but I wanted an angel. Not sure of why, I just began to draw so I could see where it would take me.

I ended up with this girl with golden wings (maybe it’s the same girl from last week?) crouching down and her wings fully open.

Text says: find your wings

a reminder to have courage. to open my wings fully and fly. It’s implied that we all have wings. We’re not getting new ones, we’re not making wings, we’re finding the ones we already have because we all already have them.

here’s a sideways look:

Note to Self: you already have all you need.

Note to Self is a project for 2015. You can read more about it here.

For this first page, I used Tam’s lesson from Life Book 2014. She taught us how to make these very simple and beautiful flowers.

These are made using your fingers and without a lot of thought. I love the way they look. They made me really happy to make. So much so that I felt compelled to write “beauty is everywhere” on the bottom after I was done.

Because it really is, isn’t it? It’s everywhere. How incredibly beautiful is each flower. The magnificent trees. All the shades of green in each tree never cease to amaze me. I feel like I am surrounded by so much beauty and yet I take so much of it for granted. I do the same thing with my family, my health, my home. The things that are just here. Things I depend on deeply but don’t realize that they are such huge privileges.

I am so lucky. Beauty is everywhere around me. In nature, in the people I love, in the food I get to taste. In the body that houses my soul.

Everywhere.

Note to Self is a project for 2015. You can read more about it here.