Tutorials

I love finding ways to use all the bits of ephemera I have lying around and in that process, I started cutting out the watercolor florals and finding ways to use them in other creative projects. Then I started making the cutouts specifically to be used in my art journaling and art projects. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use watercolor paints to create marks and add sketchy ink lines on top, then how to cut them out and use them in a collage-style tag. Supply L

Creating tape transfers from vintage magazine and book pages is a fun and easy way to add unique, vintage-inspired elements to your artwork, scrapbooking, or mixed media projects. Follow these step-by-step instructions to create your own tape transfers. Materials you'll need: Vintage magazine or book pages Clear packing tape Bowl of water Towel Scissors Step 1: Choose your Image Flip through your vintage magazines or books and choose an image you want to transfer. Step 2: Cut

Gesso is an essential product for any mixed media artist, and it's especially useful in art journaling. In case you're not familiar with it, gesso is a white, opaque paint used to prime surfaces for painting, drawing, or mixed media art. It helps to create a smooth, even surface for your artwork, and it also helps to protect your pages from damage caused by paints, markers, and other media. If you're new to art journaling, you might be wondering how to use gesso in your work.

Water-soluble graphite is a type of graphite that is soluble in water, which just means it can be dissolved. Now, regular old graphite can also be "spread" with water a bit, but the water-soluble graphite will actually dissolve and become ink-like when it's wet. It can be moved and spread over a surface, much like watercolor paint. You can control how thick (dark) and thin (light) the wash becomes by how much water you add. Water-soluble graphite comes in different grades of

Line art drawings are how I started my artistic journey. As a kid it's all I drew, and then when I picked up art again as an adult, it was a safe place to begin. It was during the Zentangle craze so finding drawing tools were easy to come by and there were thousands of tutorials for line art doodles available online. I ended up creating fashion line art doodles that I shared on Pinterest and that's how the editors at Walter Foster found me and asked me to be a part of their f

Creating a graphic art background in Adobe Fresco is the first step to creating my mixed media graphic art illustrations, but they also become art pieces in themselves. Layer One ~ With the Live Oil Brushes paint in the background. This is a intuitive process...so there is no right or wrong way to lay down the color. I select a color palette I want to use and then apply the color across the page. For this first layer I used the OilPaint Chunky brush size 512 with paint mix se

This week we’re continuing to explore colors and how colors affect our emotions. Your project will be to create color swatches and color mixing charts using watercolor paints. Colors Swatches Starting with the paints you currently have on hand. I want you to swatch out each color so you can get a true sense of the base colors you have. If you only have a limited palette of primary colors, that’s ok to start with. If you’ve got a couple of palettes or lots of miscellaneous pai