Hi art friends. Today’s post, as you might guess from the title, is a silent flip through of my digital art journal pages for Tamara Laporte’s 2022 Life Book online course.
I don’t talk much about my art journals, but I started creating them around 2009 when I found Zentangles. In truth, art journals led me to digital photographic art by reviewing the color theory and composition, as well as giving me the hand dexterity through manipulated pens, brushes, and pencils.
When I progressed from Zentangles to online art classes, my art journals moved into mixed media and inspired my first gallery show: Zeus’ Women, a series of portraits of the women Zeus tricked and the resulting offspring..
In 2019, we put our belongings in storage while our underwent a major remodel – removing popcorn ceilings, installing hardwood floors and our most wanted project: the kitchen update. Our home is less than 1200 square feet and is a townhouse style condo, so we had to move out.
I took this opportunity to shift from physical art journals to creating digital art journal pages in Procreate. Once the remodel was finished, I missed working in physical art journals but I found I didn’t want to get paint and ink everywhere. I’ve put my physical art journals in storage to force myself to work digitally.
What Procreate art journal pages have to do with Takashima and my other photographic canvases?
Good question! I used random photos I took with mobile device to storyboard Takashima as the first proof of concept. Sometimes, it’s just easier to create quick canvases in Procreate – the interface is much simpler than using Photoshop but the results are just as good.
I’d previously taken Tam’s Life Book course twice before in 2016 and 2017. In late 2021, I decided to sign up for Life Book 2022 with the goal of completing the pages in Procreate.
With all my other projects, I didn’t complete weekly Life Book pages. The course was lifetime access for all the lessons, so I’ve been completing pages at my leisure.
This was an opportunity to use some of the more art journal style digital elements in my library that I love but don’t often incorporate into my photo canvases
Here is a silent video flip through of Lessons 1 -21, well. most of the lessons. Some lessons were not art journal projects and I skipped lessons that didn’t speak to me.
The elements I used included: Foxey Squirrel, ItKuPilLi, Magical Reality, Tangie Baxter, Julie Mead, Jen Maddocks, Amanda Rockwell, and 2 Lil Owls – commercially licensed products that I own the rights to use as well as my own hand drawn elements.
It took some time to get into the digital art journal groove, but I now find it as satisfying as working in a physical art journal. The added benefits of a digital journal: not having to wait for layers to dry, not having to clean up my studio, it removed the fear of messing up a work.
In future posts, I’ll share the rest of the 2022 Life Book pages, my other digital art journal pages. I’m planning a series of posts on the tools I used to project manage Takashima from idea to competed work.
Stay tuned!
