Visual Journal - Fun with design

Visual Journals are great for going beyond the simple sketch. I only had a few minutes to do a quick pen and ink sketch of a building that caught my interest when we were traveling in the Czech Republic. The page looked so empty when I got home that I went back and added color and an interesting black and white design to finish out the page. I had so much fun with the design that I carried it over onto the facing page to unify the image.  When I was finished, it looked as if I had planned it out from the very beginning, when in reality it had just evolved!

Here I used playing cards for inspiration. I altered the pages with watercolor first and then I glued on the playing cards. I used pen and ink to repeat some of the symbols and designs that were on the cards to make a uniformed page.

You can have lots of fun using very simple designs or try your hand at more detailed work. Start small and build up - you might be surprised where you end up!

Visual Journal - Fun with flowers

Visual Journals are a great way to loosen up and enhance your creativity. I start by altering the white pages of my sketchbook in some way. In the following examples I used watercolor and colored pages from a magazine as part of the background. I then found some beautiful flowers and did contour line drawings of them with a black drawing pen directly on top of my altered background. Take a look!

 I used an acrylic paint mixture for the background in the two below. I drew the flowers with a contour line and later filled the flowers in with white gesso.

Visual Journals allow for experimentation in an uninhibited way that it is both energizing and exciting.