Journaling Challenge to Begin The 2016 Journey Within

I am really excited to be teaching in the year long course – The Journey Within, Creative Exploration Through Art Journaling and Handmade Books – hosted by Kiala Givehand. To get this yearlong journaling party started Kiala asked me to participate in an art journaling challenge/blog hop where I got to give her an art journaling challenge!!

Since (as you may know if you’ve been following along here for awhile) lettering is one of my favorite go to creative outlets, my challenge to Kiala was to create a page that uses lettering, writing & color to create the visual. I gave her a few examples from my pages, including the following two:

xox

I also gave her this image on the left…which is actually a journal cover I created. This is the image that inspired me to pull out my sumi ink and my found object writing implements.

xox

It had been awhile since I played in this way, and I had forgotten how much fun it was to write large with one of my favorite wooden stick pens. You can’t completely predict what will happen with the width of your lines, and that is part of the fun.

I used a finer point pen, carved from a piece of bamboo, for the writing at the bottom.

Once the sumi ink dried completely (and that took a little time) I began to add color using watercolor. It was fun just messing around, and I kind of like how the final piece came out (image at top of post)… it reminds me of how beautiful winter can be in the Rocky Mountains, and gets me excited to play in the sunshine and snowflakes of this Rocky Mountain winter.

I hope you’ll have some fun playing with letters & writing & color by giving this art journaling challenge a try. You can check out how this challenge inspired Kiala on her blog – here. Check out the other awesome creative hoppers (teachers for The Journey Within) here, too.

You can also click the image below to find out more about The 2016 Journey Within.