Goal-Planning-Visual-JournalToday’s picture is of the journal spread I made today, which I made as a way to work through the mental process of figuring out the theme for my 2010 Strategic Planner. (If you click on the image, you’ll be able to see a bigger version with more details in my Flickr stream.) I bought Lisa Sonora Beam’s book “The Creative Entrepreneur” right after Christmas last year (one of those “Dang, Santa didn’t get me that one!” moments). I worked with the journaling prompts last January and made some important discoveries about my personal values and goals, but somewhere along the way I lost momentum. I’ve been back at it in a sort of haphazard way the past few weeks and was just thinking that with a new year coming up it was a good time to work on making a Strategic Planner when lo and behold, she started blogging about that very subject. I’m terribly grateful that she’s sharing advice on the subject and even her own personal notes on her goals for next year. It really got the juices flowing so I could figure some things out.

So many materials went into this spread, it’s definitely one of the more noticeably MIXED mixed media pieces I’ve done lately. The background is three or four colors of blue and green craft acrylics smooshed around with a funky little foam… thing. I have no idea how to describe it; I bought it at a dollar store ages ago because it looked like it would be fun to paint with – I think it was supposed to be some sort of soap latherer bath type thingamie. Basically it looks like what happens when craft foam and Koosh balls mate. (Am I the only person who remembers Koosh balls? They were THE thing for about five minutes when I was in school.)

Umm, anyhow, now that I’ve spent a whole paragraph on the first layer, let’s see… the left page is written with a large black magic marker and a white paint marker. I added various rubber/acrylic stamps with my Staz-On inkpads. The compass and map get a TON of use in my journal, I spent a lot of my time feeling very lost. I just unearthed my knot stamp in my marathon of studio cleaning over the past couple days, and it made a nice border next to the spine. On the right page I did a little journaling about what I want to accomplish and what the unifying theme there is. I was delighted to find that my purple ballpoint wrote just fine on the dried acrylic. As I wrote, it came to me: BLOSSOM. That’s my theme for 2010. So I drew a blossoming flower with Gel FX crayons, gel pens, and my beloved paint markers. I was very pleased with the result, I rarely draw because I usually don’t like the results. Finally, I added the rose sticker in the corner, some notes in black paint marker, a bit of paper doily, and the word “blossom” that I printed on some specialty paper.

“Blossom” for me encompasses my desires for growth, independence, exploration, healing and weeding-out in 2010. My goals include getting my driver’s license, losing weight, increasing my income, and de-stuff-ifying my house.