Wrapping up the series on using a neutral color palette in your art!

Come join me in my art studio for a flipthrough of my I Am art journal. What started as an experiment — exploring a neutral color palette in my art, working in a smaller size, even a new-to-me binding — turned into a beautiful treasure!

Going into this challenge of using a neutral color palette in my artwork, I had no expectations and no idea if I would actually like these paintings, or even be able to paint without my usual vibrant color palette to fall back on.

But this experiment increased my confidence and opened me up to expanding my color palette. The thrill of trying something new — and being delighted by it — was an added bonus!

Join me in my art studio as I show you how to paint a miniature face in your art journal.

Painting small can be challenging, especially with portraits, which have so much depth and need to be painted in multiple layers, but it doesn’t have to be! Especially if you paint more in a more loose, painterly style.

Join me in my art studio as I show you how to use a stacked collage to create a simple and quick art journal page. While I am using a neutral colour palette for this page, you can use all the colors of the rainbow in your own art journal!

Bring some diversity into your art journal!

Join me in my art studio as I show you how to paint brown skin tones using mixed media. This is a very simple, beginner friendly technique to paint brown skin tones on whimiscal portraits in your art journal.

One of the most frequent complaints I’ve heard within the art journal community is the lack of diversity in instructions on how to paint faces. Most teachers focus on painting fair skinned portraits, which leaves people of color feeling under-represented and unseen.

Added to that is the fact that getting the shading, highlights, and shadows on darker skin tones is often much more difficult than standard fair featured portraits.

While there are many different ways to approach painting darker skin tones, I’ve come up with a fairly easy way to paint brown skin tones using mixed media art supplies.