Felting and Fiber Studio

Have you been using your journal? Have you tried anything new? Here are a few more ideas.

Paste inspirational paintings beside your to do lists.

Sketch a rock or shell. Try out black gesso and cover with colored pencil.

Cut up strips of black paper and make a design. Paste it in the journal.

If you use paper towels when you’re dying, save them and paste them into your journal. Add more paint as desired.

Make a collage with various paper or even strips of fabric , add writing, stamps or stencils or paint.

Paste in inspirational photos and consider how you can use these in your work. Here I was thinking about three-dimensional shapes with machine embroidery.

Paste in photos from nature and use those to sketch ideas for further design.

Here I made a stamp from the butterfly wings inspiration. Add quotes that are meaningful to you.

Visit a museum and “copy” a master’s work. Or find a photo of the master’s work online. Here is a watercolor sketch based on Van Gogh’s painting.

Find different colors in pages of magazines and tear them out. Use those colors to transition from one color to another. Paste them into your journal. I did blue to yellow but choose anywhere on the color wheel.

If you’re traveling, save brochures, tickets and other ephemera to paste into your journal. Add your thoughts or small sketches. The sketch/doodle in the top left corner was inspired by the tattoo on the neck of the woman in front of me.

Make rough sketches of ideas for creating. I was thinking about what different shapes could be made from one resist.

Look closely at items around you and sketch their shapes. These are pieces of bark I found on a walk one day.

Occasionally a technique you try from a book really turns out better than you had ever expected.  I hope you’ll try some of these ideas in your journal. I really enjoy using mine and then I love to look back and get ideas from years past. All of the photos from these journals were from 3-4 years ago. But they are ideas that I could still use now. Some will develop and others won’t but it’s an excellent way to encourage your creativity.

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!