Good Advice from Dina Wakley

Isn't it great when someone offers a piece of advice that is SO obvious and SO logical that you should have been doing it all along, but you needed to hear it in THAT MOMENT to really hear it for the first time?

I read an excerpt from Art Journal Courage by Dina Wakley in the Create Mixed Media eNewsletter about taking the leap to draw in your art journal by starting with simple shapes: circles, petals, leaves, hearts, stars.  "Get your hand in the habit of moving and making marks on your page," she writes. "You're not making a masterpiece here, you're practicing your drawing on a journal page."

If I want to start including personal drawings on my journal pages, rather than my usual "go-to" collage approach, then I am going to have to pick up my pencil, pen, or paint brush and start making marks on the page!

Obvious.  Logical.  And something I have NOT been doing!

So I used the background pages I have been painting, and drew a leafy vine with a black Stabilo pencil (which I didn't even realize I had, and completely love using!)

I used a mix of acrylic and watercolor paint on my leaves, and wet the Stabilo lines with just a little bit of water to darken and solidify them.  When I finished, I realized how perfect the design of a little plant and the sentiment "hold on to life" were for that day.  My girls were watching "Wall E," where a little tiny plant growing out of an old shoe holds promise for new life on a dying planet, and calls people back home to Earth to start their world anew.  And in the midst of some troubling medical information that sent me reeling into "worst case scenario land," those words carried a special encouragement for me.

Sometimes it really helps to hear the obvious.  If I'm going to draw, I need to pick up a pencil and put it down on the page.  I need to move it around.  I need to go to the next page and move it around some more.  "You're not making a masterpiece here, you're practicing your drawing on a journal page."  Thank you for the reminder, Dina!  My little leafy vine is a lot more satisfying than a painted page with nothing on it!