Author: Dina

Two copies of my book. So excited! I was leaving for the store when the FedEx guy arrived, and I got too excited and jittery to go, so I just stayed home!

Art Journal Freedom: How to Journal Creatively With Color & Composition

I'm honored to be part of Fall Fearless and Fly, the blog challenge series by Carolyn Dube and Jessica Sporn. You can read all about my prompt here.

And….do you spot a special something in the page above? I used my brand new Church Windows stencil, which will be part of my new release with The Crafter's Workshop in January! Woooo hoooo!!! I used Wendy Vecchi's awesome new Embossing Paste through the stencil. The paste is easy to work with. It's light and spreads like a dream…and it comes in black, too!

I have two classes coming up locally…here are the details:

Thursday, Dec 13th, 10:00 a.m., Encaustic Tag Book at In a Pear Tree, Casa Grande, AZ. This will be the last time i teach this class, come join me for some beeswaxy fun! Contact the store for more details and to sign up.

Saturday, Dec 15th, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m., The Joy of Gelli Printing at The Occasional Artist in Glendale, AZ. I taught this class on Friday and we had a blast! There were very cool and amazing prints produced that day. Come and make monoprints with me! Contact the store for more details and to sign up.

I keep staring at this. I did it weeks ago. It's not done, but I haven't decided yet what comes next. Do you have pages like that…the perpetually unfinished ones?

Join me in North Carolina at Donna Downey Studios! This weekend is a repeat of the sold-out weekend from last year.We had so much fun–the weekend is chock full of techniques, including plaster, beeswax, and lots of magic-pencil love!

Click here for a full description…we will leave our self-criticisms at the door
and open our souls and let the art guide us in powerful directions.
We'll be making both a canvas and a journal structure, moving from one
to the other throughout the weekend. We'll build up background layers,
remove layers, and build them again to create complex and interesting
surfaces. Then we'll add images with a "magic" pencil. We'll be using gesso, acrylic paints, modeling paste, stencils,
and spray inks to fill our art with color and expression all weekend
long

Payment plans now available…click here for more info.

I can't believe it's December. At the end of the month, I'll do a round-up of my favorite journal pages in 2012. This year I have really enjoyed drawing…making my own mark on my pages.

Here are 3 layouts done with the awesome December JBS kit. I tell ya, this one is so easy to work with. And you NEEEED the add-on kits, too. I could not stop using the Artisan add-on with the main kit, everything just blended so well together.

When I think of my journaling in 2011, I think of: experiments, magic pencil, layers, stamping, beeswax, birdies, stretching, anything goes.

In previous years I had told everyone that I don't know how to draw. Then in 2010 I decided, "Why can't I draw?" And I started teaching myself…

You want to know the best way to learn to draw? Draw. A lot. Every day if you can.

I also kept layering, inking, painting…joy.

By 2009, I was journaling almost every day. I truly believe that there's no better way to find your own voice than by making art on a consistent basis. You must put the artistic work in to reap the artistic reward.

I started playing and experimenting with silhouettes of all kinds, pushing my layering abilities, and mostly just filling up journals with art and seeing what happened.