Your Studio Journal

The marks you are drawn to in doodling, Zentangle, making patterns, or other types of meditative mark-making can become part of your style, even if you don’t exactly doodle while painting. Each of us has certain shapes we like to make, and this is often reflected in our brush-handling and drawing style. You can choose…

It’s easy to spend all your time thinking about what you (and your viewers) are looking at and overlook the question of who is doing the looking, from what vantage point. Changing the point of view—close up, far away, low horizon, high horizon, and so on—can dramatically change the experience of a sketch or painting. …

In the last module, we explored making different design choices to affect the mood of a painting. But wait! Aren’t there rules you have to follow for good design?  Are there? Module 24 Thinking Prompt—Principles of Design What Are “Elements” and “Principles” of Design? Most people take the “elements of design” to be the building…

When you work in your studio journal, do you ever feel cramped by the page size or type of paper? Or hesitant to practice challenging subjects, where your first attempts might be ugly and awkward? Are there times when you feel uninspired by painting inside your studio? Or by painting your usual type of work,…

When we start out with a creative medium, it’s often all about fun and relaxation. After you’ve been doing it awhile, you can start to feel some pressure—internal or external—to “get serious” about your art.  Most artists, when they resolve to take their artistic development seriously, or take themselves seriously as artists, mean “I want…

You did it! You devoted 30 journaling sessions to developing your creative potential. You’ve proved you have the most important skill for making great art: showing up and working. Understanding that not everything is going to be brilliant the first—or the tenth—time you work on it, and that’s just a normal part of the process….

You’ve probably heard me say it before: in watercolor, size (scale) matters. Any sort of wet-in-wet effect depends on the physical properties of the pigment, water and paper. You might be able to coax something to happen in a slightly smaller or larger area, by changing pigments, amount of water or type of paper, but…

An introduction to keeping a studio journal, and a quick look at how it can help you become the artist you want to be. Course Content Course Home Page Preliminaries/Preparations Course Modules

Prompts are Not Requirements The prompts are there for you to use, or not, as suits you in the moment. You can always choose to go your own way, especially if you are on fire to keep going on something from an earlier module or a project you’re working on.  You can write a journal…

Most of the time we take this to mean “What supplies will I need?” I’m going to give you some suggestions about supplies, but I encourage you to consider other things you might need to get the most from this course: Time Of course, you’ll need time to work on each module, but you may…

Companionship and Encouragement, not “how-to” The videos in this course are not technical instruction. For the most part, it’s just me sharing a few thoughts about the day’s thinking prompt, and working in my journal on the day’s activity prompt. Think of it more like working together with a friend. A friend who doesn’t mind…

Learn to use your sketchbook or journal pages to discover and develop your personal creative themes and style. 30 modules with thought-provoking questions, creativity-building activities and artist-to-artist encouragement to help you develop a studio journaling practice to discover and develop your unique artistic vision and voice. This course includes: What Will I Learn? Note: This…