My First Hurricane Journal Spread

 Hi there. Hope everyone is well and safe this Monday afternoon.

My thoughts and prayers to everyone in the path of bad weather.

There's lots of bad weather just here in the USA, I can't keep up.

So, with all the tornadoes, rain, flooding and snow, the art journal spread I finished late last week seems almost wickedly appropriate. This is in my 2009-2012 journal I'm trying to finish. One thing I wanted to journal for 2011 was the 50th Anniversary of Hurricane Carla, which was my first storm to experience. I was 5 years old. 

I took this one process shot to show that I began with a black-gesso' d spread. Here I've begun to paint some blue acrylic over it. Then, I got so into creating that I forgot to take more photos, but after the blue dried, I added a layer of silver matt acrylic to create some gray rain bands. 

Then I layered on some white acrylic, dabbing with my brush to try to recreate the spiral rain bands. Above is a photo of Hurricane Ike, which I used as a model for painting my spread background.

And here's what I ended up with. I could have gone back in with more gray to define the bands further, but I am still tiring easily and wanted to move on, so this was good enough for me. 

I found images on the internet and printed them out on some tan parchment paper. With those, a scrap of blue card, a blank manila tag, number stickers and some very old 7Gypsies journaling cards, I created 2 clusters at top left and bottom right. This is the top left cluster in detail.

This also gave me a chance to showcase my cute Kindergarten pic on one of the 7Gypsies tags. This photo was taken the Friday before the storm hit. (There was no public school kindergarten yet. I attended my church's private kindergarten which began that year on September 4. The storm hit us the night of Sept. 11. Oh wow, my first 9-11 as well.) 

Here the bottom right's cluster in detail. I made a pocket out of the blue card scrap to hold my journaling of mine and Honey's memories. He lived about 10 miles away from me in a house on blocks and during the storm a tornado picked up their house and plunked it down about 15 feet away! He literally knows how Dorothy Gail from the Wizard of Oz felt. His family was sooooo lucky to survive and with only scratches and bruises. They rebuilt a 4-bedroom brick home on a concrete foundation afterwards and my sweet mother-in-law still lives there. My memories of Carla pale in comparison. I stayed up almost all night looking through my window at the slanted rain, the trees whipping around and hearing the constant frictional onslaught of the howling wind, dozing off every so often but not for long. It was almost mesmerizing and I was really too young to be too frightened. 

One thing I find fascinating about back then was something I read about years later. Our local Houston CBS-affiliate TV station KHOU had a new young reporter I had watched all summer during lunchtime on Al Bell's News At Noon show. I liked him because he was handsome and always had an interesting story to report, even though I probably didn't understand much. My Mom liked him, so I did too. His name was Dan Rather. During Carla, he went down to the Galveston Weather Bureau to report from there on location, which had never been done before. (The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore's daredevil on scene adventures were done by Dan first during this storm.) Dan even wanted to be tied to a tree to report outside in the 175-mile winds, but the cameraman talked him out of it by pointing out all the water moccasins that would slither over him crawling up that tree to higher ground. But I digress.

 The story I want to pass on to you is that when Dan Rather arrived at the brand new state of the art Galveston Weather Bureau while Carla was still churning out in the Gulf, Dan could see on their new radar technology how massive the storm was and wanted to show that on air to urge everyone to evacuate immediately, but the Weather Bureau was hesitant to let him do that. How would radar help anyone but us, they countered. So Dan came up with the idea of a clear plastic overlay of the Texas coastline to be put over the radar so people could see it was coming for them. The Weather Bureau guys relented, realizing this would perfectly illustrate the impending catastrophe. And it worked! That one act caused the largest weather-related evacuation in history and only 46 people lost their lives, instead of thousands. AND TO THIS DAY, THAT IS HOW HURRICANES ARE SHOWN TO PEOPLE!! It's just done digitally now. How crazy amazing is that? The image above is what Dan and the Weather Bureau guys came up with (I added the red smiley face to show where I was. You can clearly see the eyewall offshore just southeast of Port O'Connor.) 

And one last look. 

👀

Another spread done and that makes me happy!

I thank you very much for the visit and I hope you have a great start to your week!

XOX

MY CHALLENGE PLAYLIST:

Art Journal Journey March Anything Goes Challenge

Allsorts Challenge Week 721 with Optional RAIN

Mixed Media Lovers March Challenge #23

Penny's Paper Crafty Challenge #542
Di's Digi Challenge: Mixed Media

A Place to Start March AG Challenge

Mix It Up Challenge #64

Tag Tuesday Challenge: Your Favorite Theme
We Love 2 Create Mixed Media Challenge #3

Classic Design Challenge March 2023 #3

Ellibellie's Crafty Wednesday March Challenge

Creatalicious Challenge #255

CD Sunday Plus Challenge #106, Hosted by Pamela

The Paper Funday March AG Challenge #51