0:00 foreign [Music] hey everyone in this video I want to talk to you a little bit about how you can set up your space for our journaling and also what supplies to use and how certain supplies can really help the process so I'm going to show you lots of supplies everything that I like to use but really this is not about buying tons of new stuff it's really more about working with what you have what you already love or what excites you and what you really want to try and experiment with
0:45 the first thing I want to show you is how I set up my journal I'm placing some parchment paper baking paper here underneath my page and I do the same on the other side and then I wrap it around the edge here and secure it with paper clips and this way the pages are not going to stick together and you can really use the same sheets of parchment paper over and over again another thing that is really important so that your pages don't stick together is when you do collage is to use matte
1:31 gel medium so this is the one that I use and this is the one by liquitex and this is the one by Golden so I use it for collage I use it to thin down some paints or to activate and seal some watercolor pencils and watercolor crayons so this is really really handy to have next thing I want to show you are inks and I have a variety of inks these are acrylic inks it means that it's just the same as acrylic paint but a lot more fluid golden high flow acrylics are exactly the same they are acrylic inks really not really paint so any brand is
2:17 fine the point of using acrylic paint and acrylic ink is that it dries fast which is really important when you're working in a journal I also use acrylic paints but in my journal I don't use a lot of them I just only need a few and you can pick whatever colors you really like whatever colors you already like to use also the reason I keep very few tubes of paint like that is that it gets very crowded on my table very fast so these are big and I keep them mostly for painting on a canvas but you can find some much smaller bottles of paint like the ones by Golden I have a few favorites that I keep with my inks and
3:03 you have also craft paints that are really great to work in a journal and they are in small containers like that which is very handy if you have limited space especially other inks that I like to use are alcohol inks they are really an important part of my art I use them all the time I'm using these in my journal because they are part of my favorite supplies I'm not telling you that you should absolutely have alcohol inks to work in your Journal not at all it's just that they are part of my process already and so this is something that I bring to my journal now if there's one kind of Supply that I really think is wonderful for the journal is these neocolor water-soluble wax pastels
3:49 there are lots of water soluble supplies water soluble pencils water soluble oil pastels but these ones here I find really work wonderfully in a journal because um unlike oil pastels they will really dry and they will mix with the gel medium so that and with water so that you can actually turn them into paint so actually I'm just going to show you what they do so they are very vibrant they have a lot of pigment much more than um regular water-soluble pencils so they get activated by water and actually I love doing it with my
4:36 fingers and they get activated by gel medium now I don't have any gesso or gel medium on my page right now so when I was using the water it just sank into the the paper so that's why you don't get that much of a painterly effect but when you do it over gesso or a collage paper you really really get this sort of paint and you can actually use it as watercolor for instance if you take a little palette and you can just scribble with your crayon and then add
5:24 your water and then you get watercolor and you can buy them as a set as a box with a selection of color but you can also buy them individually so what I like to do is really have my favorite colors in different mediums so I have my favorite colors in crayons in inks in paints and this way whatever I do I know I can get the exact color that I want next I want to show you pens and pencils that I use and really this is as simple as it gets I like to use a simple HB graphite pencil most regular pencil you can get and I like to use a black Stabilo all
6:10 pencil it's really really dark it's water soluble just like the crayons but the the black that I have I have the black and the Crayons like that but it's not the same kind of effect that you get it's much more so this is the crayon and this is the pencil and it's much much darker it's much more intense it has really the same kind of pigment that you would get with India ink now for journaling my favorite pens are posca pens because they are really paint in the form of a pen and you must always
6:56 be careful to only write or Draw or doodle over something that is fully dry so you need to shake them and push on the tip a little and then you can write with them and as long as they're not dry you can you know blur them blend them just like you would with paint and once they dry they get water resistant just like acrylic so this is really great for layering because you can add something wet on top once they're dry and it's not going to erase it and I like to use Simple ballpoint pans spiral pens they're really fun to write very very thin
7:41 journaling very thin lines and another kind of pen that I really really love is pit artist pens they are India ink pens so they are permanent and they come in the most lovely transparent colors they're great for doodling drawing sketching and if I use them on a page that already has a lot of gel medium on top like this one here they really act like ink I could color in some areas and then activate with water it's really like like ink and like a brush all at the same time which is really great when you're traveling and
8:28 you don't want to take ink bottles with you so again these are really not necessary but they're great for finishing touches to add some more intense color here and there and because they're very portable the supplies will react differently if your paper is raw and porous like that or when it is already sealed with a few layers of paint or gel medium or another thing that you could use is gesso for instance here I have this page that is started now I have this bit of a background and it's bit messy and maybe at some point I'll want to quiet things down a little bit and a great way to do this is to add
9:15 gesso because it's not as opaque as white paint for instance um Jessa was first meant as a ground that you can paint on top so it has a bit of a tooth and this way it grabs the paint it grabs the cray biomes and the inks very beautifully and it's matte so it's not going to stick when you close your Journal so you can use it with a brush like that or you could use it with a brayer and I know that many artists who do art journaling like to prep their Pages first and cover a spread with gesso or gel medium or clear gesso or a layer of acrylic paint something that
10:02 will make the paper non-porous personally I don't do that because I just like to throw everything at the page and let the the layers build up little by little so the more I add collage the more I add paint the more my page will become non-porous and it means that the materials that I use will react differently at the beginning of the process when there's a lot of paper showing and at the end when they don't don't sink into the paper at all anymore I really like each layer to be fun to be playful to be experimental and just prepping my page feels a little bit boring to me it's not
10:47 something that I find exciting and so it doesn't help me get started but for other people on the contrary just starting with something very safe and very simple just spreading some white or just some some clear medium on top of the page it's just a way to get moving and get started so by all means try and see what feels best to you so I've talked to you about the materials that you can use there are also some tools that you will need and the first most important tool costs nothing because it's your fingers and when you do art journaling really don't be afraid to get your fingers messy and sticky and
11:35 experiment make marks with your fingers and this is really something that will get you into a playful mood and this is really the most important tool you will need then of course there are paint brushes so what I use is a medium sized that's a size 18. this kind of brush is really great for collage and what I like to do is add some of my matte till medium at the back of my paper and I place it directly on my page while I do that so that the excess medium goes onto the page it's not wasted this way so I'm just going to add some gel medium on my page
12:21 as well place my papers so here it has started to blend with the white of the gesso which I kind of like so I have added some more gel medium on top and I'm pushing on my paper just to make sure there are no air bubbles it's also nice to have a round brush so this one is eight for journaling this is really great and sometimes I will use whatever other brushes take my fancy that I have around in the studio sometimes a smaller flat brush or a smaller round one a brayer like I showed you is really fun it's a fun little tool something else that I love is to use a plastic card so for instance if I take
13:06 some paint I can spread it with my brayer or with the card and if I really feather it very lightly it's going to create some great great marks you can also make lines with it you can scratch it's also really fun to keep a few Mark making tools with you so for instance bubble wrap I like to cut little pieces like that they are very handy and they don't crowd my table again I like plastic caps to create round marks I know that some of you love stamps and stencils and ink pads so if you have
13:51 some ink pads you can really work with your bubble wrap or any other stamping tool so this is distress ink but it really doesn't matter it could be any kind of ink pad there we go so there are tons of other supplies that you could use and tons of what I showed you that you absolutely don't need it's really more about finding what calls to you what you want to experiment with and as you build up your pages you're going to find out what is missing what do I need um here I would like to do some Thin marks so what tool can I use what do I already have in my home that I could try before going out and buying some art
14:39 supplies what are some Mark making tools that I can find before buying any stamps really this is about creating a practice that works for you and if it gets expensive and you always think you're going to need to buy this or that then you're not going to do it so really find a way to do things that work for you okay so we can build up the pages with paint with ink gesso pens and pencils crayons and also the most important ingredient for me is collage so I'm going to show you just a few of the papers that I like to use and what happens is that at the end of the painting session I usually have lots of
15:26 papers lying around little bits and pieces here and there on the floor on my tables and everything all these little bits and pieces they go straight into a basket that I keep for my art journaling process and my painting process so this is my basket so you see really lots of bits and pieces of this and that some very tiny ones some bits of fiber and the point of having these in a basket is that I cannot put it away because it's too big and it has a handle like that I cannot put it in a drawer or cupboard it doesn't fit on my shelf and this way I always always keep it on display and I always have it nearby with me it's
16:12 really easy to carry while I just pick up the leftover bits and pieces on the floor the simple fact of seeing all these papers all the time every time I get into the studio and seeing my journals lie nearby it just gives me an Impulse to get started so let's see what we have I have some magazine images and other kinds of images that I have cut out it's really fun to go through magazines Etc and find out what could work into your Journal once you start having a journal you're always going to spot things that you could collect I also like to print out some images from the web and I also like to have some patterns so this is a
16:58 floral pattern some tissue paper with a pattern wrapping paper a wallpapers Temple something else that I really love and that adds a lot of interesting translucent effects is tissue paper sewing pattern paper is another kind of tissue paper with interesting marks and numbers and arrows I also like to have a whole stash of neutral papers papers in neutral tones so like sheet music this is from a poetry book I really like to buy an extra copy of some favorite books and again they cost like a dollar or you can get them for free at a library sometimes because
17:44 it's very meaningful to me to infuse words from my favorite stories and my favorite authors into my artwork another kind of neutral paper that's a little bit like tissue paper is tea bag paper which I absolutely love as well it comes in lots of different colors depending on the tea you drink another paper element that I always have nearby when I create in my art Journal are cut out words so here I have some smaller ones neutral ones that are from books book pages mostly and these ones here are from magazines so they're more colorful and sometimes a
18:30 lot Bolder I could use this as a starting point to journal not necessarily gluing them down to the page but I could also glue them down and they become a collage element for my page they have this smooth texture of magazine papers that can create some beautiful effects so this is something that I love to do so I think this is it for materials and tools and the last thing that I want to say about setting up your creative space is to make sure you have sufficient light because this is really important this is going to get you inspired and get you comfortable so you can keep working and also surround
19:15 yourself with things that inspire you so I always like to have a little inspiration corner on my table for instance here I have brought some elements from nature sometimes I bring a plant some crystals so I hope this gives you some ideas on how to set up your space in a way that really feels good to you and is true to you [Applause] [Music]
20:05 foreign [Music]
