Why art journal?

Hi again! I wanted to talk a little about one of my most enjoyable activities: art journalling. I journal for two reasons: one is for the pure joy of creating and the other reason is the end goal of having many, many raw pieces from which to draw when I am in production.

The advantage of the journal is its compact size. Waiting rooms and road trips are two times where I work in my journals a lot! I always encouraged my students to use whatever was available. We often used recycled books from our school library. Some were very old.  This recycled book shown in the pictures I really loved because the paper was very good for absorption and the colors were very intense on it. For this page, I used acrylic and watercolour and then topped it off with different sorts of markers - paint markers and Koi markers, mostly. The second pic is a close up that shows you how much detail I put in while watching (well... mostly listening) to TV. When I look at the artwork down the road sometimes it reminds me of what I was watching, lol.

I have found that art journalling really feeds my professional practice. I create large mass-appeal wall art for art licensing and the work in my journals is usually my starting point when I start a new series. I have hundreds of scans that I use for layering and compositing in Photoshop. Recently, I have started using components for my surface pattern design practice as well. And lastly, I use these to create products I sell on POD sites to earn a little additional income.

I will discuss my tools and techniques more in upcoming blog posts, so make sure you visit back!