Another step by step.

This is old and copied from my other blog.  Here's a step by step art journal page.  .  

I randomly paint the pages using Crayola watercolors, then sometimes close the book on them while they are drying to make this weird effect.  Sometimes I get fancy with the painting, but not usually.

I then measured and drew a border.  I found in a lot of my free hand border making of the past that I was very, very crooked and sometimes I would end up with a really good drawing inside a really crooked border and it ruined all my good work in my opinion.

I free-handed some lettering and an arch shape.

Then I drew some flowers.  Flowers are what I like to draw.  Flowers and trees.  I have branched out in a couple and tried to draw birds, but I'm not that good of an artist.

I reached into my big bag of markers and pulled out random ones.  This is a huge old craft bag of my mom's and sometimes a marker lid will come off and the marker will saturate the bag with what looks like blood stains or something else, depending on the color.  I have tried other bags, but keep coming back to this one, even though it is ugly, I can separate markers for future use into the many pockets and also throw even my largest journals in there for carrying.  I sometimes journal at my daughter's piano lessons and at her craft sales.

I colored in the flowers and letters and drew a leaf border.

Then I hunted out all my greens.  I have a hard time keeping green markers because I use so much green.

Then I colored in the leafy border.  My daughter says it is too much green on this one and I think she's right.  I think some kind of blue border would have looked better.

Then I began the black outlining.  You can see if you look closely (sorry about the blurriness of this one) that it stops halfway through the top of the green squiggly line because 12:30 arrived last night and that was bedtime. 

Have a good day everyone!

How to.

Here's kind of a step by step art journal page, but it's backwards, so start at the bottom.  :-)

And it's done.  Maybe.  I may outline all or part of it in black.  Or white.  We'll see, I guess.  I think it's better to take some time, so I'll look at it in a couple of days and then decide.

I did some detailing with my magical white Sharpie.

I decided this flower needed a darker circle around the middle.  See it below, it looks kind of weird.  Now it looks better. 

I wrote in a bible verse because that's what I do and drew in a flower stem that I had forgotten on one of the flowers and drew some ferns with a green sharpie.  

More coloring.  

More coloring.

I use multiple colors on the leaves too.

I like to use multiple colors on each flower, my goal is at least 5 different colors per flower.

Then I piled a bunch of markers on my desk.  Generally when I do this, I make an effort to use them all in the picture.  Today I kind of cheated because I decided I didn't like all of these colors.  I used some and threw some of them back into the caddy.

Went a little crazy with this because it was pretty fun.

Back to the stamps, using a pencil eraser and a marker this time.  

Then I outlined the rest of the flowers.  At this point, I always think that whatever drawing I am working on is going to turn out horrible.  I always think they look bad, but I persevere.  :-) 

I did go over the mistake with a white paint Sharpie to help minimize it a little.  

Then I made this mistake on one of the other flowers.  Made a mental note to color this petal with a dark color.  :-)  

So I decided to make it into a different type of flower.

and then another one, quickly making a mistake by encroaching this stem on where I would normally draw the flower petals.

Then I started drawing with one of the center flowers.

Last night I lightly painted the page in blue/green.  It's very light. Then today I used various objects (above) to stamp circles on the page.

Bible art.

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