I use my studio journal for lots of different things and I thought some of you might be interested in seeing how I use it. I discussed some of the different uses in my last post so I thought I’d show you a bunch of different examples.

Practice your lettering and fonts.

Make a color wheel with paint, colored pencils or markers.

Here’s another example of when I got new markers and pencils.

This was a fun exercise. I used walnut ink and then tried marking with a variety of things such as a twig, a feather, a sharp rock and whatever else I could find around the house. It makes you realize that you can make marks with anything, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a pencil or paint brush.

Document useful information that you find online. This is about using a value scale.

Make little squares and then fill them up. The ones on the left are just doodles. the ones on the right are a study of values.

Record useful information you find in library books. This is more information about design and value studies.

Play with left over paint or dye. Whenever I have any color left over, I put it in my journal. Sometimes I just paint the page and then use that as a background. Other times, I leave the paint as a color study.

Glue down rice paper in a different size pieces, let dry and then paint.

There are more ideas coming next week. Do you know of any fun “exercises” to try in your journal? I hope you have a wonderful Valentine’s Day!