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!
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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.
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If you’ve seen my art, you know that I LOVE color — blues, pinks, oranges, bright greens — bring them on, please! But what you probably don’t know is that I absolutely love seeing artists who paint with a lot of white and with neutrals — there’s something so very striking about their art. I’ve never been able to successfully paint with a neutral color palette, though. Until last month, that is.
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There’s something about owls — mysterious, wise creatures of the night with a gaze that can pierce your soul. I end up painting an owl at least once every year in my moon journal, which is where I create an intuitive ritualistic painting every new and full moon. For this tutorial, I’m showing you how to paint an abstracted whimsical owl. Gather your supplies, and let’s begin!
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Grab your art journal, pull together some of your favorite acrylic paints, brushes, and a few other supplies {scroll down for the supply list} and get ready to create a sweet little whimsical figurative painting.
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If you’ve been around here for a hot minute, you know that I’m a diehard art journaler and that I absolutely love intuitive painting — especially figurative abstracts. I art journal almost every day, even if it’s just for 10 or 15 minutes. And painting intuitively perfectly suits the short bursts of time I spend in my art journal. I can leave things to dry, come back and look at my art journal spread with fresh eyes, and find stories within the layers of paints and marks.
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I had filmed this expressive abstract painting at the end of 2020, and forgot all about it! But it was fun to go back and listen to my musings on struggling with the pause between one year and the next as I created this abstract acrylic painting, and to see how much better I have become now, at the start of 2022, with embracing the pause!
Though I am working on a small piece of mixed media paper, you can easily follow along in your art journal.
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Grab your art journal, pull out some of your favorite paints and mark making tools, gather together some stencils and masks from your stash, and let’s paint!
I’m painting in my handmade mixed media art journal, which is filled with a mix of starter pages that have some collage, stencils, and marks on them, and some plain pages where I can give my thoughts free reign.
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It can be difficult to figure out how to begin an art journal page, but if you think about it layer by layer, it gets easier – and more fun! It is the same with collage – the key is to take it one step at a time.
I start this page by playing with marks and color. Beginning in this way, allowing for the intuitive exploration of colors and marks, makes for a much more expressive and interesting piece of art.
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There are days when you long for some gentleness. For softness and sweetness. For innocence and a certain je ne sais quoi.
On one such day, I pulled out my one-page shopping bag art journal, and decided to paint a sweet little flower girl.
Some of the collage paper on the page inspired the idea for the flowers in her hair, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t create something like this in any art journal.
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