“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” -Leo Tolstoy

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Recently I’ve fallen in love with creating these journal pages.

I use the same step by step process to create each page, which makes it easier for my creativity to come out in each new character. I just love how each one has its own personality… and they are SO fun to do.

I started by limiting my art supplies for these pieces… so I’d only use a little travel watercolor set, a stabillo pencil and 3 water soluble oil pastels. That got my creativity going. It seemed that by limiting my supplies, it opened the door so that I felt it was so much less overwhelming to just get painting.

Then once I got into my comfort zone with these paintings, I started adding more of the art supplies I love… like an antique white shiva oil paint stick, a rainbow or water soluble oil pastels, white Sharpie paint marker and acrylic paints.

Little by little, I felt my style growing and evolving.

It also helped to be creating in a cheap blank journal (rather than on canvas or expensive watercolor paper).

I felt so much more free to just experiment and create a pair of characters, one mirroring the other on each page.

From there, I began adding words with paint pens, calligraphy ink and pencil. That tied everything together, so that I could build upon my love for these whimsical characters and give them a bit of story, right there in the painting.

And I can’t wait to see where these journal paintings take me from here! Find more of these journal pages on my instagram here.

“who knows if the moon’s
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky–filled with pretty people?
( and if you and I should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited,where

always
it’s
Spring)and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves”
― E.E. Cummings, Collected Poems

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I hope you have a wonderfully creative weekend. Happy painting!!!

xo,

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Ps. I’ll be sharing many of these and similar pages in my new online course BLISS -Mixed Media On Location. Class begins April 21… there are still a few sale spaces available (use discount code sale at checkout here).

I’ll be posting a sneak peek video very soon. In the meantime, Find More Details Here.