My friend Leslie Herger at Comfortable Shoes has been running a lot of videos of various artists and their art journals.  I have been enraptured by many of them and decided that I HAD to try this.  After two days of watching Suzy Blu Tube videos and stalking Leslie on Twitter where I asked her tons of questions (and she answered every one of them!) I finally just sat down and did it!

The first thing I did was gather supplies!  I love gathering art supplies.  I talked my beautiful young bride into letting me run out and buy a small bottle of gesso and a box of watercolor crayons.  I also bought the journal and some acrylic poster paints, as well as some way-cheapo paint brushes.

We even got Girl2 involved in this process!  I really hope to instill a lifetime habit with this.  I think it would be really cool for her grand kids to pull out her journals and see her whole life laid out like that.  I have doubts that she will continue it past puberty, but maybe she’ll pick it back up in her twenties.

I had three different ideas all fighting for “First Dibs” of the journal.  I will do them all but the first ever entry of my first ever art journal is “State Fair”  I layered the background in gesso and watercolor crayon.  Then I used the gesso and the white acrylic poster paint to white out the shapes.  I painted the images with acrylic poster paints, watercolor crayons, and sharpie markers.  Then I added random memories text with red acrylic poster paint.

I like the way it turned out, however there is a bit of a learning curve.  First, I’ve never worked with gesso so that was an experience all on it’s own.  Second, acrylic poster paints are way more opaque than watercolors, but not nearly as much as I had expected.  Also, and this was the most important lesson (besides cleaning up before the wife sees the mess):  When you gesso a page in a spiral bound notebook, take care not to “glue” the pages together with gesso.