How To Make Art Journal Pages With Your Fingers VIDEO

Its only 11:30am and already I am covered in paint.  What an amazing way to start the day! (and a tricky issue when baby boy wakes up and wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast.  "Sure honey, would you like that with or without acrylic paint?"  I am finally starting to break out the Art Journal making supplies, and trying to psych myself up for all this craft show prep that needs to happen in 6 weeks time.  I've been wanting to make a few smaller journals that features hand painted pages ready to inspire their new owner, so I decided to start there today.

I have also been hearing from a lot of you that art journaling is something that you've always wanted to do, but just havn't jumped in that ocean of creativity yet.  So I thought I'd show you how I made 12 double sided creatively prepped pages in just 20 minutes.  I only used a few materials, pastels, pencil, white paint, and ink mostly with tools of roller stamps, and my finger (no brush needed!).

It was incredibly fun and fast, and I hope it encourages you that any one can do this with very little tools and very little art technique. 

Here's the video of me creating the pages! Enjoy the colorful messy fun!

Just wait, and I'll reveal the final completed art journal tomorrow!

XO, HARMONY

Inside My Art Journal: Exploring My Yellow Self

 I am taking a fabric surface design ecourse right now and have been giving a lot of thought to patterns and colors that I want to experiment with in a textile.  It's really hard sometimes to sketch out ideas and it feel totally original to me. There are so many iconic background creators out there right now, sometimes I feel at a loss for what is truly me and what is inspired by the images that I have seen.  I believe that it is truly ok for an artist to use other people's work as inspiration.  In fact it's how a lot of really famous artists got their ideas, by working alongside and being influenced by there artisan counterparts of their day.  But sometimes when I use a technique frequently used by another much more famous artist, I feel inauthentic, and in-authenticity is a total killer of creative energy.  So today's journal pages truly reflect me wrestling with myself to find a unique creative voice that is totally me.  I also really wanted to experiment with pattern making on yellow backgrounds ever since I saw these! Yes, you can get inspiration from anywhere, even socks.  The trick is how to take that inspiration and help it grow something new and unique that could only come from you. 

So here are my 2 pages for today.  I also used a lot of the artsy tape that I made with you yesterday.  Can you spot all the different ones?  If you'd like to create your own tape for a project, check out my DIY here.  Thanks for stopping by today.  I'd love to hear what you are journaling about (on paper or on your blog) today.

XO, HARMONY

A Sketchy Moment

Today has been a busy day of playground visits, swimming lessons (not for me, thank you), bike rides, crafty errands, and then hours upon hours of computer work editing, listing, and writing all in the name of being a good momma and trying to promote my art world a bit.  So as I was scanning things, I popped in my ideas sketchbook and scanned the last page I was writing in.  Mostly filled with doodle fun, inspirational word ideas for the embroidery hoops, changes I want to make to my blog (in the process as you can see), and for some reason the phone numbers to the local city pools (setting up those aforementioned lessons).  It is a truly funny compilation of ideas, brainless moments, and work stuff, so for some reason I thought I would share it.

What sorts of stuff do you fill your ideas sketch pad with?

*FYI: The Newsletter is up and ready to view.  If you didnt receive on, you can find a link to it HERE.  Dont miss out on the Sale!

XO, Harmony

The Infection of A Great Idea

I like to read other people's blogs in the morning.  It's the perfect way to let the coffee slowly jump start my system, my muscles start to warm up, and my thought processes open back up from the night before.  I find at this time in my day, I am specifically drawn to the artsy design-based blogs that I follow.  I often find that I'll come across a new painting, design idea, color combination that will set my creative wheels spinning with ideas.  It helps me gear up for working in my studio.  Today, I ran across this post, which (ironically) is a re-post of one someone else did like 2 years ago! A great idea can be infectious like that.

The original post, put up by DesignSponge, was a tutorial on how to create a repeating pattern.  Now, I've never really been attracted to pattern making, mostly because it seems tedious and complicated, and my computer Photoshop skills are minimal.  Despite all that, I was intrigued.  I read the post, read the original post, and the follow up post, that yet another person did with their own trials of using this pattern-making technique.  I figured, what the heck, I'll give it a go, and grabbed some scrap paper, a Pitt pen, and some scissors and tape.  I had NO IDEA what I was going to draw as a pattern, so I just let my barely awake brain relax and just did whatever came out from my hand.  I started with birds, because I've been practicing bird shapes lately and that was quick and easy.  I tried a couple of the shapes that the example in the post used, and then just kept filling in white space.  It was freeing, fun, no pressure whatsoever.

 When I felt satisfied with what I did in the middle of the paper, I started cutting and taping it back together as instructed.  I scanned the resulting image into my computer (as the example explicitly stated the importance for clean, exact, perfectly matched up lines - which I can never do, as you can see - i am a very inexact person and proud of it).

I was able to erase any evidence of the lines from my image and printed it out and then started again, filling the middle space back in again.  It was super fun.

When I was done, I scanned it back into the computer and started playing with filling in the elements with color and added a background of an old paper bag (the same bag image I use for my blog background ;).  Here's what it looks like so far.  I have quite a bit more coloring in to do, but like I said, my photo editing skills are very slow.

I got totally sucked into this project!  I spent several hours on it and I had no real purpose for the image, but I loved making it.  It was downright therapeutic! I think I'll try another one again soon, just to see what I can come up with, because I'm not really sold on this one.  Even though it came out way better than I was expecting, I think I can do better.  But then again, I always think that about everything I create.  It's always a process, with no real specific destination.  So try this technique sometime.  You'll enjoy it, I promise, and let me know how it goes :)