Join me for a free creative journaling workshop on Sunday, September 12th! We’ll be trying out some image transfer techniques, including the two demonstrated on this page:
All materials will be provided, except for your own art journal. Click here for more details!
This is a few years old, but I still like it.
I was very pleased to find this ribbon hanging by one of my submissions in the photo exhibit at the Orange County Fair!
It really was an honor, even just to be part of the exhibit. I think it’s the first time I’ve had artwork of mine on display since elementary school.
Here’s the photo I submitted, entitled “Off-Color”:
“Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.”
~ Jules Feiffer
What’s your favorite color?
While I’d like to say I have been super-creatively-productive while away from my blog, I must confess that my journeys into both journaling and photography have been much curtailed over the past few months. I have been focusing very hard on finishing the first draft of a novel, which is monumental, yes, but the creative energy I was tapping for that project was very different from the creative energy that allows the type of expressive art I usually show here. It was a very intellectual type of creativity, intent on plot and structure and character development, necessary but not very enjoyable. Now that I am moving on to the rewriting phase, when I will start turning what I think is a good story into something artful, I can feel the need to play more with visual forms of self-expression start to kick in.
These are a couple pages from a new journal, just the start of a new journey!
Whew! It’s been a while, but we’ve finally got a fresh new schedule for our FREE creative art journaling workshopping at It’s a Grind in Laguna Hills. We’ll be gathering on Sunday afternoons, now, the second Sunday of the month for the foreseeable future. Here is precise information on the next event:
Join me for an afternoon of exploration, creativity and fun as we use pictures, symbols and design to express our thoughts and dreams. Combine images and words to create a visual map to your own inner landscape, and find new tricks to invigorate your journal writing. No experience required!
Bring Your Own Journal, Sketchbook, Notebook or other Blank Book
Some supplies will be provided, but feel free to bring your own. Recommended: colored pencils, markers, pens, rubber stamps, stickers, decorative paper, glue, scissors, pictures, magazines, watercolors, paintbrushes, hole punches, etc.
I will have a small number of blank journals available for purchase, priced $5-$20 depending on the journal.
I hope we’ll see you there!
Not everything you put in a journal turns out exactly like you imagined it. Proof: the above page titled “A Flock of Fairies.” I like the background just fine: I dripped walnut ink down from the top of the page, and since I thought it looked like trees I added green watercolor, which made the walnut ink bleed nicely, creating a nice foresty feeling. I added some stamped leaves for depth.
The fairies started out pretty good too. I really like the triangular dresses cut from text paper, and the wings punched out of backgrounds from the Unicorn Tapestries.
But it all went wrong when I tried to do faces. All. Wrong. I’m trying to stretch myself in my art journal by doing my own drawing and stuff, instead of only relying on cut-out images, but faces are just giving me fits. Which is weird since I spent a month a couple years ago doing nothing but drawing faces and got fairly good at it. Now it seems I can’t even make two dots for eyes and a curvy-line mouth with consistency. Very frustrating. I hate the way these fairies ended up.
But, in keeping with my personal goal to 1) include more self-created imagery in my journals and 2) just have fun playing and experimenting I decided I could live with it this time. It’s supposed to be fun, right? But the truth is I actually ended up liking it a bit more than I thought I would.
Here’s what saved the page for me: after doing terrible things to the poor fairy faces (and let’s not even mention the fact that I misspelled “fairies” in the page title) I figured, “what the heck” and decided to add an impromptu piece of poetry to the page. Now, I’m no better at poetry than I am at drawing faces—it takes a lot of trial and error and erasing before I’m even remotely happy with any verse I come up with, so for me to commit a raw piece of poetry to ink is a big step for me. I just started writing, beginning with the idea of a flock of fairies, and here’s what came out:
(I’m warning you, this is a very silly poem, but I’m sharing it because I think it gets a point across.)
I met a flock of fairies while roaming in the wood.
They told me if I was patient and very, very good
They would bring me to their fairy king and he’d have me for his bride
And though I didn’t believe them I felt a bit of pride.I strolled along beside them pretending to be queen.
I pinched my cheeks, and primped my hair and like a peacock preened.
The fairies, they did giggle, a humor to their glow
But I paid no mind to them, I was putting on a show.We came at last to Mirror Lake and there I saw afloat
A silver barge, a galley grand, and many other boats.
“Go on up,” the fairies said. “He’s waiting for you there.
You’ll know him when you see him for the crown upon his hair.”Those fairies they were giggling still as I climbed upon the barge,
But I let them have their bit of fun and wore a smile large.
Never trust a fairy, I know that’s what you think
And sure enough I ended up just splashing in the the drink.But let me tell you something I learned upon that day:
It’s always fun to play with fairies no matter what you play.
Let them have their little tricks, their games and jokes and pranks,
And if you even end up wet, you’ll still be saying thanks.
Get it? I didn’t, not until I sat down to transcribe it here (because I knew a couple of you would want to hear the poem). Fairies or art journals: it doesn’t matter what you end up with, so long as you’re having fun along the way. That’s today’s lesson, folks. Sorry you had to survive the bad poetry to get it!
I don’t recall being particularly fond of coloring as a child. I do know, though, that by the time I was a teenager I had discovered a few lovely, over-sized coloring books filled with fine, white paper and detailed designs clearly not intended for the under-10-and-crayons set. These intricate pictures required the finely honed point of a colored pencil to complete. My favorite had a ballet theme, each full-page illustration accompanied by text that told the story of the ballet being shown, but I feel certain I must have had a unicorn one as well, or possibly one with a general mythology theme. I also had a couple geometric design books (one cats, one just abstract designs) and of course the fabulous medieval stained glass coloring books that are still available.
In college, I graduated to poster-sized pictures. These were fantastically detailed pictures that came in a tube—mine were fantasy themed, naturally, full of dragons, castles, fairies and other magical beings. Freshman year, a classmate and I justified splurging on a 72-color Prismacolor pencil set for a class project we were working on together (set or costume design, for theater, I’m sure) and somehow the pencils ended up in my care when we were done. After four years of coloring, some of those pencils (forest green, in particular) were worn practically to nubs, but the remains of that pencil set lives in my kids’ art supply box even now.
It was a great stress relief, back then. Engaging the hand, but not the mind. Requiring a certain artistic sensibility (you had to choose colors, after all, and you had to pay enough attention to stay in the lines) but not demanding any great creative effort. Exactly what a young mind engaged in serious (ahem) studies needs for a break.
But since college, I’ve never done much coloring at all. I’m not sure why I stopped, other than perhaps I picked up a few other hobbies that occupied my hands without requiring a lot of thought (crochet, Internet). Even when I got into papercrafts and rubber stamping, I didn’t use colored pencils that often—ink and markers gave much bolder colors, after all. Of course, I hadn’t yet discovered the magic of watercolor pencils.
Have you ever tried watercolor pencils? They look and act just like regular colored pencils, except with leads that are a bit softer than what you are otherwise used to. That’s because when you add water to the pigment of a watercolor pencil, it melts turning into a puddle of paint on your paper. Rich, color-saturated paint that you can move around and blend with a brush, and has none of the scratchy, tell-tale marks that coloring with pencil leaves (my 7th grade geography teacher used to mark us down if all the pencil lines on our colored maps weren’t going in the same direction). I had never heard of them until maybe 5 years ago, and even so I’ve never given them much play before now, just coloring the odd stamped image or laying down a background wash. They’re wonderful to shade with, because of the way the colors can be blended.
The best kind of brush to use with watercolor pencils is a water brush, with a reservoir of water in the handle. It’s better only because it’s convenient: regular paint brushes and water work just as well, but they’re not as easy to carry around. You can get them in most art supply stores for very little money. Mine’s a little frazzled looking, but it works just fine. I usually keep a paper towel handy to blot off excess paint between colors, just to avoid unwanted mixing.
Look what a dramatic difference it makes—before water:
And after:
Here’s the full page, right after I finished “painting”:
And then a scan, after I outlined my sections with white pen for a more defined look:
Last Thursday, I made an important rediscovery. I came home from my writers group with a head cold settling in fierce, but the men’s figure skating final was on and I wanted to stay up and watch. I wanted something to occupy my attention between performances (so I wouldn’t have to listen too much to the chatty commentators), but because I wasn’t feeling well I didn’t want anything too complicated or elaborate. So I sat down with my art journal and a pencil and doodled: my creative inspiration was the decorations on the wall of the Olympic ice arena. After sketching out a pageful of wavy lines, I went in search of my watercolor pencils. Fuss-less, you know?
As I sat curled up in the chair, across the room from the one working lamp, I remembered how absolutely pleasurable simply coloring can be. The repetitive motion, the scratch of the pencil across the paper, gradually filling in a pre-defined shape with color. It was soothing, exactly what I needed to help me feel better.
(I did the waterbrush painting the next day, and added some highlights with markers. The background had been painted a few days previously, with watercolor paint.)
In fact, it was so soothing that I repeated the exercise the following day, this time with doodled swirls across the background of a larger spread. I was still sick, and increasingly worried about my also-sick cat, so this kind of low-key, mess-free activity was exactly what I needed. The bonus comes because of the watercolor pencils: not only do i get the old, remembered stress-relief of simply coloring, coloring, coloring, I can go back and finish it up for a very satisfying piece of artwork. It’s the best of both worlds!
I have long indulged in comfort writing—a little private world with some much beloved characters that I turn to when I am too tired or emotionally wrung out to deal with my current writing projects, but I still feel the need to write. After 10 years, I know them and their story so well I don’t even have to think about it, and because no one but a few close friends are ever going to see it I don’t have to worry about whether or not every sentence is artistically sound. It’s mechanical, almost. The words just go down on the page, filling in the lines that are already in place.
Just like simple coloring.
I’m really thankful to have rediscovered this old pleasure of mine. You can bet I’m going to be doing a lot more of it in the pages of my art journal.
“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”
Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
