This directive is a follow-up to the guided imagery, "Self As A Tree." Here is a video of my process after doing the guided imagery for myself. I hope you will give this a try!

It's deceptively simple to make a SoulCollage® card:
1. Get your materials (a 5x8 mat board, magazine pictures, scissors, and good quality glue)
2. Select a "thing" a single image that really grabs your attention
3. Start to cut out your thing
4. Select a "place" where your thing wants to live
5. Composition, figure out how you want to place your thing in it's place
6. Glue and trim
7. Process your card (I will demonstrate this later, stay tuned!)

In the past week I have begun a personal challenge to get me into doing better self-care. This challenge I am calling "99 Days of Art" and it is exactly that, I am making art for 99 days over the course of nearly 16 weeks. I had to factor in taking time off for training days, conferences, and holidays that are coming up. The idea came to me after following some art therapist and artist friends on their art challenge journeys and wondering how they got into it. Then thoughts starting coming up for me like these, "Wow, I miss making art for just myself," and "It's been so nice making artwork lately, I really didn't do much before moving here," and "Why did I stop making art?" I realized over the past several years I had slowly stopped making art in my everyday life and it was not a good thing. I felt bereft, like something integral to my very being was missing. So I decided to create my own art making challenge in order to develop it into a practice, which would eventually become a habit, a meaningful habit that helps me feel grounded yet transcendent at the same time, but a habit none-the-less. I have been at it for 6 Days now focusing on utilizing my intuition rather than making something visually concrete and representational. Here are the products of my practice:

To follow my progress follow me on Instagram @nissajackman
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I was so inspired and excited about my last piece that I made for the Violet Hive Art fundraiser, I had to make another one. I call this one, "Two Horizons" I hope you love it as much as I do!

I have been working on a special painting as a donation for a fundraiser for Violet Hive Art Therapy, the Art Therapy Collective I belong to and rent space from for my practice. The money raised will go to Violet Hive to pay for things like repairing the swamp cooler which is a necessity during a hot Denver summer. The hope is to raise enough funds to be able to offer free services or scholarships for some of the collective's programming. It's been a real pleasure working with an organization so committed to community enrichment. 
How this whole thing works is wood boards that were sanded smooth were provided to anyone who wanted to create a painting for the fundraiser. 
The wood and wood grain served as inspiration for my work. I used watercolor and gouache (a more opaque watercolor) paints and followed the wood grain to create "Blue Bird in Sunset"

Check out a new video I did of me painting. It has music and everything:

There are times when I just want to zone out. During those times if I want to do something more than just doodling I like to make repetitive line drawings. A favorite is making 3-D hands where you trace your hand on paper and using a ruler and a marker or pencil make regular straight lines an either side of the traced hand shape and then adding curved lines on the hand shape connecting the straight lines.  I did something a little different here:

Here is the finished painting from the previous video. I'm quite happy with it. If you squint it looks like a landscape.