The Juliet Journals: Butterfly's Ball

BUTTERFLY'S BALL: MIXED MEDIA ART JOURNAL PAGES BY JULES CAPULET AGED 16

Digital collage 24ins x 12 ins

This morning I woke up with a MASSIVE zit on my face

I feel like such a minger! I have SO TOTALLY hated being 15

It feels like a nothing age when you are not a girl

any more but not a woman either.

On Friday I will wake up 16 and suddenly

Everything will be different. I am SO excited about

my party! Even if I still feel like

an ugly grub I can put on a mask and

I will become a BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY

This is the first time I've worked on companion pages together: both image and journaling. At some point, I shall spend more time re-working the font to make it look more hand-written, but it's a job to keep up with the young people as they dash towards their inevitable fate. This page is already a few days out-of-date: today is Jules's sixteenth birthday and this morning, before going to school, she Tweeted happily about her new mobile phone and how excited she is about tonight's party, which is to be a masked ball. The entrance rules stipulate home-made masks only. Laurence Friar has gone up in my estimation, as he has miraculously, and some might suggest, unbelievably, managed to get Romeo to make a mask without yelling "THIS IS SOOOO F*CKIN' BORING!!!!" and storming back to his comfort zone of Xbox and internet dating. Romeo believes that he has just found THE ONE in an online chat room but, unless Jules has been up to something that she hasn't shared with us (which would be completely in character for a girl of her age) we, of course, know better and so are eagerly awaiting tonight's famous, romantic encounter.

My sixteenth birthday was a long time ago but I do remember the frustration of being 15: still very much a child but feeling oh-so-grown-up and ready to fall in love. If I could go back and give some advice to my 16 year-old self, I'd tell me not to take life so seriously or be afraid to make a few mistakes: not that my mother and grandmother didn't give me that sensible advice at the time, it was just that, of course, I knew far, far better than they did...

If you missed Jules's last journal page, you can find it HERE