Happy New Year!

A special page created for my mom and daughter!

birds from artchix studios.

Little fairy face

Pencil, watercolor crayons, white acrylic paint, and watercolor pencils in a three-quarter portrait.
Check out Fab Faces at willowing arts.

Tonight's face time

Here's the result of tonight's practice session. A combination of watercolors, pencil, white acrylic paint and watercolor pencils and crayons. She's a bit weird, as I was experimenting with different eye shapes and nose sizes.

Watercolor face

Practice - practice - practice. Here's my next one -- using pencil, watercolors and white acrylic paint.

Paint a face

My first attempt tonite to paint a face! Watercolor crayons, pencil and white acrylic paint.

Draw a face

My first attempt tonite to draw a pencil sketch of a face. She's a bit out of proportion but it was fun to divide the face into sections and create the features. More practicing to come!

A good day to stencil

A good day to stay inside and play with my stencils. I love layering and layering stencils!

Happy Journaling!

Practicing my lettering

Check out Joanne Sharpe's site for online classes.

Journal page

I started this page back in July at a collage class with Diana Trout. I covered pages with gesso, torn magazine papers, and drew a grid in the thick gesso. Just the other night I opened up to this page and added a little more background color, stenciled the feather and pattern with acrylic paint and then glued the strips of washi paper. I haven't decided if I'm going to add some journaling -- a quote I found about a feather -- but I am going to make a color copy and glue to the cover of the journal.

DLP, Weeks 41 and 42

Last week's challenge was polka dots. This week: stars!
Polka dots were created with a circle template, acrylic paint, white pen, colored pencil and painted deli paper circles.  The stars: peerless watercolor and Faber-Castell Pitt pen.

Documented Life Project

Starting this project a little late, but better late than never, right? I was just introduced to this, so here are my first pages of my dlp planner.

I love drawing sunflowers and I love writing with white pens on black paper -- so I combined the two! The week's challenge here is using white pens.

Read about the project here: Documented Life Project

Art Journaling Workshop at Walking WInds

Thanks to all who came out to art journal today!

Cut out letters

Experimented with Joanne Sharpe's lesson on stenciled pages and cut-out letters today!

Check out Joanne Sharpe's online classes.

Find joy in everything you choose to do

Combining collage and lettering grids

I started some collage pages in my journal when I was at CREATE NJ last month.  During the workshops I realized I didn't have a lot of collage papers with me so a lot of the pages were unfinished.  When I got home, I added black gesso and some lip quotes with gel pens to this page. Just having fun!

Peerless watercolors

I love Peerless watercolors.  Orange is the "joy" color for me, so I went on either side of the palette starting with Orange Yellow.

Artfully Abstracted Letters

Here's my practice piece for "swoopy loopy" letters, adding doodling, and then painting in the negative space. Then I tried a second piece with the word "create".

Check out Joanne Sharpe's online classes.

Doodled Letters

Here's my first attempt at Doodled letters as encouraged by Joanne Sharpe. I'm not finished experimenting. Sometimes I get very detailed and Zentangle-like - like this example, other times I like to be real-sketchy and loose. Fun!
Check out Joanne's online classes.

Letters in the Round

Practicing my letters in the round -- from Joanne Sharpe's lessons.
Had so much fun tonight!

If you want some great inspiration, check out Joanne's online classes.

Bird House at CREATE NJ

I spent the weekend at CREATE NJ in Somerset where I thoroughly enjoyed four different and exciting classes.
My Saturday night class was taught by Jane Davila. We learned how to collage and stitch fabric and paper together to create a bird house.  Jane noted that there are 43 different types of birds, all of which you can do fun research to learn more about them before creating your collage. For this project, I chose to portray a jay bird in honor of my best friend, Jay. Here's to you, Jay!

Anticipation of summer...

Back to the scrap pile and my glue journal... just pulled pieces out of the pile and glued!

I guess I'm anticipating the wonderful summer ahead.

It's a pink grapefruit day!

When I know I need to spend more time in the studio but have no inspiration, I often start by cleaning my art table. I know it sounds counterproductive, but it works for me.  After the table is all clean and the old sponges and rags are gone, I can concentrate on the pages I'm creating.

Today I grabbed my neglected glue journal and the overflowing scrap pile.  I love my scrap pile; there's everything and anything imaginable in there! Two of the collage pieces are actually color copies of my painted journal pages.

I found a cut-out pink grapefruit, so it was my inspiration for the page.

Hope you're finding a way to journal about this beautiful day!

Happy Easter

This year's batch of onion skin eggs.  I was a little low on onion skins, so these turned out a bit spotty. I like them though! Happy Easter!

Art Journaling Workshop

Even the pouring rain didn't stop us from having a great art journaling workshop today at Walking Winds Holistic Center.

Waiting for spring. . .

I've been sketching bulbs but the delicate line drawings didn't make it onto this page.  Instead, as I worked with the bright primary colors, I wanted to add some bold stenciling. Now that the page it completed, I feel like three little plants are looking out the window hoping the warm weather will come soon!

Inspired by the weather, once again

I finished the snow spread by adding icicles today. What's your inspiration for your next journal page?

Snow day inspiration

Hopefully, you will stop shoveling and allow the snow to inspire your imagination! I did.

Here comes the ice..

Enjoy the beauty of the day!

My attempt at showing the increasing snowfall!