Art journal, dog nose, MOO, and a quote

Amazingly, I began my fourth art journal on October 13th.  This is the title page -

Pretty much to the point :-)

Although I have been an artist for as long as I can remember, the practice of serious daily art journaling began a year ago.  I took Cat Bennett's class, Sketchbooks: Making Art a Practice, and during the course of the class I made a commitment to journal every day.  And now, twelve months later I have three completed journals and more importantly, a daily art journaling habit, yay!

About a dog's nose?  My golden, Remy, loves to go walkies and spends the majority of the time sniffing... everything.  I have learned to take it easy, not rush, give him the time to investigate the world in his own way.  Oy, even if it involves standing about for 45 or 50 seconds while Remy is sniffing an unremarkable bit of grass or a single (!) leaf.

This activity, which is of paramount importance to my boy, deserves a drawing:

A different world...

Today's MOO is a word combination that materialized in my thoughts.  I am not entirely certain what it means, but it does have to do with thinking that is not jaded by negativity:

The quote is from Shakespeare -

For me, reining in Expectation in its many guises has been only positive :-)

Oddly egg-y

This sketch of flowers is from my art journal:

The Egg Flowers (ink, colored pencil)

The blossoms began as randomly placed yellow marker circles.  Next I surrounded each one with jagged "blossom" heads.  I let them sit that way because I thought, "my, my, they look like eggs, now what?"   I felt a bit unsettled with the visual/linguistic combination of egg and flowers.  O, I should explain, I am a little queasy around eggs that are out of the shell - I just am :-)

I came back in a few and added the leaves, stems, and ground.  This is what I love about daily art journaling - it's very easy to take a chance, explore, and experiment.  I find the greatest value in executing the daily practice.  I wrote more about it in this blog post (Carla Sonheim's art journal layout, Cat Bennett's class, Making Art a Practice).

The Inconstant Journaler

Yes, I was an inconstant art journaler; days or even weeks might pass without a new entry in my officially designated art journal.  However, an idea from Year of the Spark plus a recent online class have changed my ways :-)

The first influence I attribute to an art journal page layout that Carla Sonheim shared in a Year of the Spark lesson.  The page looks like this:

Draw it new every day.

Creating the boxes and printing a set group of words is a nice ritual to get my hand moving.  I like the categories for the boxes – I find them to be very useful.  Also, the sketchbook is a plain wire bound one (so it isn’t precious in any way) and it is a larger format – a Strathmore 400 Series 9” X 12”.

The second influence is from an online class I recently completed – “Making Art a Practice” – which was taught by Cat Bennett.  Cat emphasized enjoying the creative process and doing it daily.  She generally sticks to simple tools and media e.g. a few brushes, colored pencil, opaque watercolor, and NeoColor II.  Cat’s approach is relaxing and playful :-)

These are some randomly chosen pages from my art journal – specifically of the Draw and Misc boxes:

Remy in ink.

Colored pencil, ink.

Pitt brush pens, ink

Sharpie pens, ink, Pigma Micron pen, randomly created “stamps”

The content is pretty much what I see around me or doodle or imagine - probably why my red coffee mug appears so often :-)  The "10 Ideas" box is great for capturing thoughts or projects which come to mind first thing in the morning.  I like capturing all of it in one place.