Art, Heart and Healing Journal Page

I am so pleased with this journal page. For years and years I have wished I could draw and shade faces. I have watched numerous of videos free and paid lessons in learning all sorts of mixed media techniques. A couple of months ago I signed up for some of Jane Davenport's online classes. I feel in watching these videos and following her tips I have made great strides in my capabilities. I am excited what might be next in my creative art explorations.

I did this page following week one of Tamara Laporte free video lessons Art, Heart & Healing. 

Tamara is another great teacher. I have signed up to take her Life Book 2013 series that starts January 1st. It is going to be another exciting course.

Life Book 2013

Some art work to share.

I am taking a second online class of Jane Davenport's. I have thoroughly enjoyed both of them and hope to eventually take her other ones also. Here are the latest ones I've done.

Thanks for looking!

Supplies catalog

Loved this video on how someone kept their supplies catalog. Inspired me to start working on mine again.

http://www.youtube.com/user/purklepoi?feature=g-hist


I've always kept lists of the different supplies I have to keep me from buying duplicates. After taking a watercolor class I started making tabs of the different paints. The tabs I use to keep in a small box. After seeing this video I have started to put them in a notebook. My supplies notebook has 2 sections.

The second section is the lists of colors of a particular supply I have.

The first section I am adding the tabs by color. The right page is water colors and the left is paints.

I am still working on markers and colored pencils. I'm going to have to get a thicker notebook. It's a lot of work but I enjoy the benefits of it.

Thanks for looking!

Finally took apart my art Journal

For the longest time I kept thinking about taking apart my Strathmore Visual Journals for various reasons. I thought it would just be to hard and mess up the Journal. After seeing a video (wish I could find it again) of someone taking apart her Canon Journal I decided to go for it. I am really glad I did. The pages are so much easier to work on. When I am doing a double page layout the wire binding is not in the way. When I make mandalas I like to use different kinds of papers depending on the art media I use. When I put the mandala journal back, I'll be able to put the different papers together. 

Below is a picture of the covers I've done for one of the journals. I followed this video in doing the different layers of colors.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX7LrJ3_9jY&feature=g-hist

When you do take apart the journal the back cover comes off first then the front cover. That's handy if all you want is to do the covers.

Thanks for looking!

Seed of Life

A couple of weeks ago I did these two mandalas.I used my guides to create the sections for the circles.

This one I used my brand new Twinkling H2O's

This one I was inspired from  here. I used colored pencils on 140 lb watercolor paper.

A couple of days ago I came across a great website: Guada's Circle she offers a free class on creating a mandala. This method of creating a Seed of Life mandala is a lot easier than using the guides that I came up with. Seeing how she colors hers is very inspiring.

Here are a couple of links that I found on You Tube that also use this method.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Su-m19xTpw&feature=g-hist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHvXUNeYGs0&feature=g-hist

Thanks for reading!

Creating Star Shaped Mandalas

For a couple of years I have been making mandalas in my art journals. When I first started I wanted to have stars in them. I used a protractor and compass to get my points evenly spaced out. It was very time consuming using the protractor  and I thought to myself there had to be an easier way. Here is what I came up with. My architect husband using his drafting software, very easily made some different sided shapes for me and I printed them out. Now I use these reusable guides, a compass and straight edge.

I first tape down the guide on to the page using temporary tape.
Then put the pointy end of the compass in the middle of the guide and draw a couple of circles.

Then I create the sections by lining up the straight edge on the lines of the guide and use a pencil and make a mark on each circle. (Draw the whole line if you think you might use it in your finished design.)

Then line up your straight edge from the marks on each circle.

Using the marks I didn't use on the first star, I created a second star behind the first one.

For me using this method takes minutes instead of an hour in starting up of my stars.

If you want to try this method, right click these images then paste into a word document. In a word document you can easily re-size the images to what you want. My guides are about 2 inches.

10 sided

12 sided

14 sided

16 sided

In another post to come soon I will post how I finished this one.

Thanks for reading!

Making your own Washi Tape

There are a lot of videos out there on making your own Washi Tape. This particular one video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5BYnfQxoPQ&feature=g-all-u using Score tape and tissue paper has made me to want to finally make some. I love to discover new ways of using something I already have. I don't have Score Tape but I have some double sided tape that I don't use to often that I got at a rubber stamp convention. I don't remember the name brand.

What is super exciting to me is that I have a great stash of fancy napkins that I keep collecting. This is going to be fun.

Best to take away all the layers except the top one.

Adhere the double sided tape.

In the video she used scissors to cut hers. I first used a exacto blade but it tore the napkin. My rotary blade and a straight edge did a nice job.

Washi tape ready to use!

Thanks for looking!