Artist Sam Jowers

It wasn't long after I carved the first rubber stamp that my beautiful niece, Alex, announced that she was getting married to Eli!  Alex is an independent, self assured, beautiful young woman!  She can handle anything!  I named the ship the "Alexandria" because Eli sunk the ship only to be saved by Her!!  And we all know that when we save someone we love...we really save ourselves!!  I love how close up the action is and that the waves go in different directions.  There is a calm in the middle of the storm where the two lovers are!!

After my house fire in March of 2014, I started carving a series of mermaid prints.  The first one I made was "living in the wreckage".  I had just lost everything, I had no art supplies, no art work.  My marriage had been dead for some time and I was in the process of putting the last nail into the coffin.  I had had five major surgeries in the last three years.  My life was a wreck.  I was so grateful to be alive but I was numb to life.  With no art supplies I purchased a little hand tool for carving and a piece of rubber block and I started making prints of mermaids.  This piece was so special to me because it was the beginning of me "thawing out" from the cold shock of my life. You can find this print in my (etsy)[https://www.etsy.com/listing/217669946/4x6-mermaid-block-print-living-in-the?ref=shop_home_active_5] shop.

I love integrating fabric and string into a page.  For this page, I hole punched so that I could thread my string across the two pages to hold it together.  The prompt was "how do I feel today".  Obviously, I felt "barely held together".  Using watercolor, I made it look like a weepy wound.  I also used my ransom note letters to do the wring for me.  We did this page in a mixed media workshop. This concludes the Journal52.com series of journal pages.  I plan to focus on a different Altered Book Journal.  I will need a couple of days to finish the last pages.  Its about mermaids!!!  See you in a few days!

I love my town.  I actually live in Pearland.  That is a city just on the outskirts of Houston, Texas.  In Pearland, it still has a small town feel, everyone seems to know everyone else.  Just a couple of miles up the street is Houston!  4th largest city in the united states!  And...Everyone seems to know everyone else!  It is strange how friendly everyone is here.  No matter what it is, I can probably find it in Houston.  When I get tired of the bustle of the big town, I can step back over to Pearland.  I have the best of both worlds! For this page, I used a credit card to scrape paint across the surface of the paper.  I then used it to scrape in the buildings.  I drew the outside of the letters letting the back ground form the HOUSTON.

The Journal52 prompt was "newspaper".  Do you know how hard it is to find a newspaper anymore?!  Our culture has moved away from reading their news in the paper...the internet is so much more current.  Unfortunately, it is also un-fact checked so you do not really know if what you are getting is true!  (That could also be said of newspapers but there was an understanding in the journalism field that you could be found out if you didn't tell the truth and your reputation would suffer for it.) Me, I just need newspapers for paper machet and can not get enough to feed my student's habit of making sculpture!!  lol

I absolutely LOVE texture.  I like how it feels.  I like how it actually cast shadows and reflects light on the page.  This Journal52.com prompt was "texture" and I took it literally.  We use a lot of Velcro at school to hang paintings onto the pro panels.  We only use one side, so I had a lot of the fuzzy side hanging around.  I made a cut out of the rat and placed it on top of the sheet of Velcro I created.  (I think it was three rows of Velcro side by side.)  I have netting and sand paper, foam letters and some other bumpy stuff on the surface of my paper.  I then painted over the entire surface so that it was one color.  I rubbed some blue across the texture so that it would catch a little color.  I created a cut out of a hand and spray painted or "graffitied" it onto the surface of my page.  I love how you can actually pet the rat. Our culture has become so paranoid about touching.  We are either afraid to be touched because we are hyper sensitive to wha

The Journal52.com prompt was "making time for myself".  How do you do that?!  It seems that every time I turn around someone has something else they want me to do! and never mind all of the projects and ideas I come up with for myself!  I wish I had a dollar for every time someone contacts me because I'm the high school art teacher with a project they just know my students would love to do and OH! you can make it a class project!  What do they think I do when they aren't coming up with something for me to do?  I know that what they really want is free labor and their project done by someone else...My students are not day laborers and barely know how to do what I have yet to teach them!  do you really want them to paint on your walls?!  (rant over) lol.  You can seriously neglect the part of you that is creative because you get excited over everything that comes your way.  Before you know it, it has been five years since you actually painted something from your own

I have always LOVED "ransom note" letters.  Those are the letters cut out of magazines used to write a ransom note.  Of course, I've never had to use them for that purpose! lol.  I like to glance thru magazines and see how expressive the lettering for adds are.  The artist who puts that add together has made some very distinct decisions on font, color, size of each letter to convey not just what the word will say but how that word is supposed to make you feel about the product they are selling.  I purchased enough large matchboxes to create a chest of drawers to keep these cut out letters ready for my journal pages.  I use them for everything!  Tags for gifts, labels for jars, writing poems for my altered book journals.   For this page, I thought about the cookie monster on sesame street and how he loved to eat cookies.  Well, this monster loves his ABC's so much he thinks they are food.  Not the way "food for thought" should be ingested!  

The Journal52.com prompt was "greatfull".  Honestly, sometimes its hard to feel like you have anything to be greatfull for and that leaves you feeling like crap!  You want to live in a state of Grace, Greatfullness, but some days, that just isn't happening!  What do you do about it?  How can you get yourself back to a place where you realize that you are so blessed that you can't feel anything else but greatfullness?  For me, I have to make a list.  I start small.  Where am I sitting? What is on my body?  Have I eaten in the last hour, day, week?  Can I get a drink of water if I want it?  Can I take a shower and change my cloths?  Can I Share that with someone else? and my list spirals out until it encompasses the planet of good things that are blessings.  before you know it, I'm not focused on my self but on others and the feeling of greatfullness is overwhelming! For this page, I went with what I had.  I got an old print I made right after my house fire. 

So the prompt was "what is your favorite food?"  Honestly, I chose bacon.  I don't really think that it is my favorite food but OMG, it can literally be put on anything to make that my favorite food!  Its not the most comely of items to eat.  Its brown.  It has been put on top of vegetables, more meat, salads, Ice Cream!!  and...one year, four of my students made me a dozen bacon roses.  They were DELICIOUS!!!  When cooked crispy, it is the perfect combination of crackle and chewiness.  the flavor is both savory and sweet.  I love bacon. Please do not get me bacon for my birthday because it is also bad for your body!

This journal52 prompt was "Friends".  We all want them, we all need them and we all have them!  the people in our lives that make the difference.  Even if you are a so called "loner", there are people in your life who could be potential friends especially when you find you need one.  And....when do you step up and be a friend to someone else!  The old adage "it is better to give than to receive" is so true but doesn't tell you that by giving, you are also getting in return!  Its the secret to the whole action of friendship!  We are all the same, We just need to find a way to make this journey not a lonely one! Be there for someone else and you will find that your own needs are being met! For this page, I pulled back to my childhood, when things were much simpler! I took a newspaper and made a paper doll chain.  You fold the paper back and forth like a zigzag and then cut the shape of a person making sure you keep the folds where the hands meet t

Sometimes, we just need to sit down and recap all the things we like about ourselves.  Social media can really put  a dent in our self esteem.  Peoples lives are so full of stress that they overflow onto your own belief systems.  Just do it.  find 20 words that are part of your truth that say something about you that you can brag about.  if you cant find 20, then you are not looking hard enough and you are being too unkind to yourself. I know lettering is a challenge and when you know that you have creative spelling issues, you have to just bite the bullet and jump in.  I colored my back ground with blocks of different colors.  I then used a flat brush to paint in as many words as I could.  I then  outlined all of the letters with sharpie.

The prompt was "technology", but this page was all old school, use your skills to get it done.  I was testing some new colored pencils and really loved how my grid looked but the page was too small to use in anything so I cut each square apart.  I couldn't get enough of them to go around the outside of the page so I had to create a background.  For this, I colored a swatch of dark purple and highlighted the outside of it with a yellow highlighter.  Finally, I drew one of those plug men spelling out "technology... all plugged in" with the cords.  Yes, I cut around every curve and cranny with a pair of scissors.  Sometimes you have to do it all the hard way!

Look back in your memory and find one single small joyful childhood memory.  Tell your story. The most insignificant ones sometimes bring the most joy! Find a page in a magazine and turn it upside down to use as a back ground, then brush some paint color over it. (Turning it upside down keeps people from wanting to read the words that are on it.  They become less of a distraction.)  When it dries, write your memory.  In the craziness of my relationship with my dad, Crabbing was one of the few activities that none of us kids got in trouble doing!  And...you could always catch the crab and never have to rebate the string!  Im not even sure how my dad knew how to do this since we never lived near water before we came to Texas.  SO Much Fun!!!  I remember, we crabbed all day and had about 80 crabs,  He made us kids sit around the bucket and get the meat out of all of them.  That was the worst part but I do remember laughing with my brothers and sister.  I didn't like eating the crab.

The prompt was "under the sea" so I chose to do watercolor on drawing paper.  This caused it to look rumpled.  I've always been fascinated with octopi and mermaids.  I must have been channeling my inner Picasso because her eyes are all wonky.  This should be a lesson to everyone; Draw, Journal with image no matter how great your drawing skills are.  Express yourself visually.  You can only get better and all the foibles just reiterate that your are flawed and so scrumptiously HUMAN! BTW, there are no "right" colors!  notice that her hair is whatever color my brush grabbed up while painting!

There is something satisfying about peeling the surface of a cardboard box.  The wonderful reveal of the ridges and waves of brown under the surface of the box are quite intriguing.   Find a box that has a nice side that has not been crushed or broken in any way.  Cut it down to the size of the page you want to do.  (I would first check the sides to see which way the ridges run.  For this page they run horizontal which allows me to use the ridges as a horizon line.)  I used a pencil to draw my image on the surface.  Think negative/positive but since you will be painting over it, your drawing wont show anyway.  I then took a sharp exacto blade and cut around the edges of my drawing, making sure not to cut through to the back of the page.  Cut around ALL drawing shapes that will be staying.  That way, if you peel too quickly, you wont actually peel off the other drawings in the process.  After all of the surface was removed and the ridges were exposed, I took a sponge with paint a

"we kill all the catapillars and then complain there are no butterflies"  John Murston.   This page started out with me wanting to see how my new heat gun worked. lol.  I got a box of old crayons and started melting them while I colored an entire sheet of drawing paper.  It reminded me of fall leaves on the wet ground.  So beautiful!!!  The surface is a bit waxy but not so much that it can't be worked with.  I did scrape the wax away under the papers I glued on top so that they would adhere to the page.  The bugs were just images I pulled from the internet and printed from my office printer.

I use a lot of banners and flags to get my message onto my page.  I am notorious for misspelling words so it helps if I can create the banner on a different piece of paper and just cut out the banners and glue them on.  They are easy to make.  I just make parallel lines and cap off the outer ends.  I will then add flounces or extra flags from the bottom.  Sometimes I add scrolls to the ends to make them fill visual space.  Everything on this page was cut from another paper and glued on, even the knight.  I then used a sharpie to draw in the poles of the flags.

Sometimes...your pages are just not that great~  They will never be put into the Met, the subject matter doesn't move mountains or inspire anyone and your schedule says you don't have time to make a page....DO IT ANYWAY!  You have to feed the creative dragon every day or at least once a week or it gets anemic and dies.  On my calendar for the next three months I have written a word.  I asked everyone I knew to give me random words so that if I get stuck and I can not think of anything to draw or create a page about, I just look at my word bank for that day or any day I didn't use and  create a page.  Ideas tend to flow when the passageway is well oiled and open.  Doing Journal pages keeps the passage open and usable when you need it!

Mandalas...they are a form of meditation.  Until this one, I had never heard of one and had never attempted to make one.  At the time, five of my students and myself were part of an art supply testing survey and I needed to create a piece of art that used all of the products to see how they worked and if I liked them.  I had pencils, colored pencils, sharpies and watercolor...I think.  The journal52.com prompt said to create a mandala.  I started by making different sizes of circles like a target.  I then used pencil to make lines out from the center so that I would have a "graph" to create sections of interlocking and overlapping design.  Pick one element and repeat it in every section of your graph.  Take your time.  It does not need to be done quickly or even in one day.  Spend 10 minutes on just one element a day as a form of meditation or a "spiritual time out".  Really focus on each part as you repeat it over and over again.  It could take you a month to fi

So I made this page long before there were school shootings and the image of a child holding a gun wasn't being discussed in the news.   My niece is now 18 but when I took this picture, she was about four and very small for her age.  I was visiting my brother and as I drove up the driveway I see my nephew who is younger than my niece, running across the driveway. As I get out of the car, my niece comes around the corner, mad as can be with this BB gun.  I pull out my camera and yell "hey! get back over here!" and my niece stops and walks up with this angry face and the shotgun.  I took the picture.  It was such a disturbing image, I have used it in several pieces of art.  (let me preface that my brother has taught all of his kids to hunt and fish and they live on about 40 acres of land so they were probably hunting something, but chasing each other was not what my brother taught them to do.) Now, for the page .  I sometimes use photography in my journal pages. 

I have always loved drawing with ball point pen.  It is a medium that feels like it has a life or a soul.  The same can be said for hands.  They tell you so much about a person.  No matter what you do to a face to make it look younger, you can always tell a person's age from their hands.  These are mine.  They are the soul of my body.  I can not imagine my life with out them!  A little note.  I totally misspelled "hands" at first and forgot to leave space for the "s"...I love the solution!  lol

For this journal52.com prompt we were supposed to show how we refresh ourselves.  In Junior College, there were a group of us who were not fresh out of school.  We sort of came together out of a need to get thru the classes and not feel alone taking college courses with all of the younger generation.  We would meet every week to talk about our art projects and figure the whole college life thing out.  We became a wonderful support group. When we all graduated and went our separate ways we decided that we had to meet once a month in one of our homes. We would drink wine and share our current projects.  More important, we held each other up in life.  Lots of laughing and wine!!! that's what it is all about! The technique for this page was really cool.  I made stencils out of hot glue by making designs onto a cookie sheet with hot glue gun.  When the hot glue cools down, simply peel them off of the cookie sheet and place them on your page.  You can then use spray paint or make

I love grouping objects together by color.  It makes things disappear and also brings texture to a work.  Its amazing what you can group together in a "drawing".  I used to love the "I Spy" books as a child.  I actually have clear drawer columns with each drawer containing objects of one color.  Its a great way to find things when you need them!  I pick up any object on the ground and make it into art!!

The journal52.com prompt was "party animals"  I interpreted that to be the balloon animals that every kid expects to see at a really great party!!  I started this page by doing scribbles in colored pencil all over the page.  I then painted blue watercolor all over the surface and let it dry.  I love the challenge of painting see thru objects.  In this case the latex balloons are not see thru but do show the shadows of shapes that are behind.  Each section of the balloon has its own shadows and high lights.  the trick is to paint what you see thru the front of the balloon except for on the edges where the balloon gets thick because your are seeing thru the rubber laterally.  Don't forget to paint the reflected color...the red balloon reflected onto the green one.  You can never see thru a highlight.  I have a really bad habit of going around the edges of my painting with black marker.  I'm afraid that my painting edges don't translate very well