Good evening!

I am a little bit late in getting this post published, but better late than never!

Today I am very happy to be sharing my process video for an art journal spread that I have recently done in my 2018 Soul Book.

The inspiration for this spread was that I have a song that means a lot to me this year that I wanted to document and remember. That song is called Life Uncommon, which was written and performed by Jewel.

The words to Life Uncommon are:

Isn’t that just lovely? It seriously is one of my faves and has been floating around in my head for months! I just knew that I wanted to put the lyrics to this song in my Soul Book, but thought I would first decorate a background and just paste the music on top of the background.

Well, I gave myself permission to put some music on and just play, and before I knew it I was on a creative-mojo-filled-roll!! I love when that happens!! Anyway, before I knew it there was no way I was going to let myself cover up the abstract painting I was doing. The colors were different than anything else I would have ever put together, but I L-O-V-E-D it!!! So, I had to come up with some kind of solution as to where I was going to put my song lyrics. The simple solution popped into my mind, and that was to create a pocket out of the 2nd page of my spread and the following blank page. That combined with some double-sided sticky tape, and viola!! It worked beautifully!!

I ended up mounting the song, that I had printed onto plain printer paper onto opposite sides of a nice piece of water color paper, and that gave the song some heft, and kind of turned it into a gigantic tag – perfect for the new pocket that I had created!

I finished by doing a bunch of doodling on the spread, as well as doing some journaling with a white pen. I did that part after the video because I thought for sure that I was done, but later, when I went back to look at my spread again with new eyes, I just knew what I wanted to say on this spread, and instead of doing a tip-in or anything, I decided to write it out!! I wrote from top to bottom on the right hand page, and then flipped the whole thing over so that the writing is upside down on the left hand side – I thought that was a fancy shmanzy way to do that, and I love they that it turned out.

The materials I used:

• Dina Wakley heavy body acrylic paints: Ruby, Blackberry Violet, Ocean, and Tangerine
• Liquitex heavy body acrylic paint: Titanium White
• An old hotel key card (for scraping my paint in a thin layer on the background)
• Dina Wakley paint brushes: 1 inch, a small round brush
• UHU glue stick
• a small Uni Posca Paint pen: Black
• Double-sided construction tape (a gift from my sweetie)
• My Fiskars precision paper cutter
• Scissors
• StazOn permanent ink pad: Jet Black
• Date stamp
• Bic black doodling pen
• Construction pencil from Lowes
• Uni-ball Signo Broad: white
• Small white paper plate for my paint palette
• Song printed on 2 sheets of regular white printer paper
• 1 sheet of thick watercolor paper

I hope you enjoyed watching this process, and more importantly, I hope that you are inspired to  to maybe do a similar kind of art journal spread in your own Soul Book!

As always, if you have any questions, please let me know down in the comments section, I am always happy to be of help! Also, please let me know if you do decide to do a spread like this, what song would you choose to use?

Thanks so much for stopping by!