Free Art Journal Doodling Ideas! Great Doodle Prompts & Tips Sometimes a doodle is more than a doodle. In this excerpt from Journal Bliss , author Violette shares how doodling is part of your artistic mixed media journey. Click here to download the Journal Doodling technique PDF. This technique is from the book Journal Bliss by Violette. WHY ART JOURNAL? Never miss another great doodling tip with the Create Mixed Media email newsletter. You may also like these articles:
The Creative Healing Studio Do you remember when I wrote about my daily gratitude focus ? I had connected my feelings of abundance to being connected with gratitude and I decided I was going to do a daily gratitude focus. I realized that when I focused on the gratitude in my life I felt fulfilled, joyous, and abundant. I even wrote myself a cute little note to remind me. Who wouldn't want to do something that made them feel good right? Did I do it? About 10 days after I wrote that blog post I was introduced to a book called Make Miracles in Forty Days. The secret to this is that you aren't just focusing on all the good things that are going on in your life. The reason behind this is to focus on the truth and the reality of where you are right now. So, I've been doing this with my bestest friend in the world Carrie every morning now for 35 days. I would say the most amazing miracle that I've noticed is that I wake up every morning and the first thing I think of is, "What am I grateful for today?"
Pen & Paper: 5 Blogs for Journaling and Story Catching Inspiration ALT Summit NYC - note to self I promised that I would share, didn't I? Now, to say I had fun at Alt Summit NYC would be an understatement, and while I can't share everything (I didn't write it all down), I can tell you that the panels were simply great. If you ever get the chance to go to an Alt event or take one of their online classes, I do highly recommend it. One of the highlights was hearing directly from three Martha Stewart Living editors (Lucinda Scala Quinn, Pilar Guzman and Kevin Sharkey). Some photos and other favorites (including my popular Kate Spade pumps!) I also enjoyed hearing from some fellow bloggers (Jenny, Natalie and my dear friend Katie) about their adventures and personal approaches to the online environment. Another great talk came from one of my all-time blogging heroines: Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss (also Creative Mornings, Teux Deux and Tattly). "Check out" links: Dan Gilbert's TED Talk on the science of happiness / Paul Graham's "How to Do What You Love"
One Page. One Idea. Sometimes you have a little more time and want to make an art journal page that reflects a single thought or feeling. In that case I like to work in a smaller book. Yesterday's page was in a standard sized notebook. When I do solo pages, it is a method of layering that I most commonly employ. Let me know if you have any questions! Here are some more of my "one page - one idea" journal entries. Thanks for stopping by! fab blog Weeks of Wonder: Creative Blocks We all sometimes get creative block. Sometimes an art project just doesn’t work and we can’t figure out why, or what we need to do to give it that little extra something. Well, next time you hit your creative block, try getting creative with your blocks! My acrylix blocks aren’t just a great space saver, they can also be a great tool for creating unique and beautiful designs. Let’s look at how this technique comes together to create this Season of Thanks card. Apply your selected colors of re-inker to the baby wipe in rows. Lightly mist your block with Spritz cleaner or water. Then swipe the inked portion of the baby wipe across the moistened block. Next “stamp” your block down firmly on your paper. There! Now, take this block technique and break through your creative block by trying some variations. Use this same technique on a small block for an accent piece that can highlight a small portion of your stamped image.
How the Art World's Lingo of Exclusivity Took Root, Branched Out, And Then Rotted From Within The hypnotizing argot of the art world is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to decipher a gallery press release or encountered a nebulous artist statement. It’s a vocabulary of modified adjectives and abstract nouns, of concepts that get deconstructed and ideas that get interrogated, distributed practices and embraced ambiguity. In a recent article for the innovative web publication Triple Canopy, Alix Rule and David Levine coin the term “International Art English” (shorthanded “IAE,” roughly equivalent to the popular nickname “artspeak”) to describe this language, tracing its history and divining its murky rules. IAE “always recommends using more rather than fewer words,” the authors write; it “sounds like inexpertly translated French;” is marked by an “uncanny stillness;” and has a heavy “dependence on lists” (guilty as charged). Rule and Levine peg the origin of IAE to the critical journal October, founded in 1976 by art historians Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson.
The emergence of talent: genius and precocity Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. “I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. Cézanne didn’t.
Anyone can learn to be a polymath – Robert Twigger I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. The monopathic model derives some of its credibility from its success in business. Ever since the beginning of the industrial era, we have known both the benefits and the drawbacks of dividing jobs into ever smaller and more tedious ones. The average job now is done by someone who is stationary in front of some kind of screen. In fact, it wasn’t. So, say that we all have at least the potential to become polymaths. I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Visit our new film channel
Art as Therapy: Alain de Botton on the 7 Psychological Functions of Art by Maria Popova “Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.” The question of what art is has occupied humanity since the dawn of recorded history. For Tolstoy, the purpose of art was to provide a bridge of empathy between us and others, and for Anaïs Nin, a way to exorcise our emotional excess. But the highest achievement of art might be something that reconciles the two: a channel of empathy into our own psychology that lets us both exorcise and better understand our emotions — in other words, a form of therapy. In Art as Therapy (public library), philosopher Alain de Botton — who has previously examined such diverse and provocative subjects as why work doesn’t work, what education and the arts can learn from religion, and how to think more about sex — teams up with art historian John Armstrong to examine art’s most intimate purpose: its ability to mediate our psychological shortcomings and assuage our anxieties about imperfection. But these worries, they argue, are misguided.