My day job recently took me out of town.  Again.  It’s getting to be sort of a habit with them.  Anyway, I had to leave on a Thursday which forced me to take my show, The Artistic Biker Live!, on the road.  I packed all of my cameras and laptop gear, loaded up some paints in some of those travel TSA kits from The Wal*Mart, and prepared for a night of sheer panic.

Turns out, aside from leaving my management stranded at a bar so that I could get to the show on time, things went pretty smoothly.  The hotel’s bandwidth wasn’t quite strong enough to handle Ustream, Tweetdeck, Skype, and ICEchat all at the same time so there was considerable lag on the video and on the interview.  Otherwise things couldn’t have gone more smoothly.  I am looking into getting a broadband card for the laptop so maybe that won’t happen again.

That night, I interviewed Paula Phillips, a.k.a. @Journalartista.  Paula has been a scrap book keeper for many years and has slowly been switching over to art journaling.  Recently, she injured her foot and was housebound for several weeks.  During that time, she really dove in to the YouTube videos and found herself flooded with knowledge, ideas, and inspiration to share.  She began putting out videos, sometimes two a day, on art journaling instruction based on what she was learning and how she was applying that new knowledge.  She has since healed enough to be able to return to work, but she still regularly produces videos and even a weekly Ustream program.   Paula’s years as a scrapbooker have given her a well trained eye for color coordination and composition.  Her pages come together, seemingly without thought, and they usually turn out beautifully.  She uses a lot of “ephemera” as she calls it, as well as stamps and stencils.

When I interviewed her, I took a cue from her and gathered ephemera from my flight: A SkyMall catalog, a Continental Airlines magazine, and even that Journal Pocket they give everyone (a barf bag).  My flight was at sunrise so the scene I recreated in my journal was of the lady next to me pretending to sleep so she wouldn’t have to interact with strangers.

You can see the video on The YouTube, or just watch it in the embedded player below:

Upcoming events on The Artistic Biker Live!:

26AUG2010 Ricë Freeman-Zachery will be joining us discussing her amazing textile works, sewing, and meeting great people even in West Texico.

02SEP2010 Bill Flowers, The Snake Artist, is coming for an in studio visit and we will go out sketching in the wild of the Wichita “Mountains”.