I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to painting lately. Both en plein air and finished works, not to mention my weight weenie walks. Skipped the other day due to hellish allergy induced sinus pressure. As I’ve done that my art journaling is not totally going to the way side but it has changed and adapted itself to my current needs. It’s smaller lighterweight and going back to my roots of art journaling- ink and watercolor. It’s simple, fast and efficient. My ideas are simply drawn and then colored in. My words are scrawled across the page and are equally as simple as the pages themselves.

My current art journal is a small 4×6 inch spiral bound Strathmore 400 series drawing  sketchbook. It’s a size and format I used to work in ALL THE TIME. IN fact in 2002 I did a whole series of small ink studies of local (at the time) Washington county areas*. The bridge in East Machias, scenes from the East Machias Grist Mill park, drawing from Bad Little Falls Park in Machias, among a whole series of others. These were sold on eBay for various inexpensive prices, ranging from $2 to $10. Hey, I had bills to pay.  Those little drawings, plus many larger went all over the world to people who had visited the area on vacation.

Though I loathe spiral bound sketchbooks and journals, this will do for now, I had it in the studio, unfinished and it begged me to fill it. I’m going to go through my various sketchbooks and see which beg me to fill them and see if I can.

I have to admit working the Cloud studies has made me prodigious in my work. I’m filling sketchbooks left and right and looking forward to the next, I need to go back and look for some that need filling, or have little in them so far. I’ve already pillaged a couple for their fabriano paper pages. I am not ashamed to admit I tore the pages out of the journal to paint cloud studies on them.  The binding was completely ruined when I removed the pages. I rather regret that as it was a fine book and once from early in my career in bookbinding. The binding itself hangs loose from the cover. Perhaps in my next Ustream I’ll show you the damage and the reason I don’t like tear pages from finished sketchbooks. I’ve done it, and sold the art, but you have to be careful to not ruin the binding.

Anyway here’s an art journal page for you to look at.

*2002 is when, you might recall from previous posts, I was single and spent the summer doing nothing but art and a crappy part time job. It was a glorious time in my life, single, carefree and moving forward with my life. My goal in life is to recreate that summer but here where I live now, and support myself with my art classes and art for life instead of a single summer. The start of that is about a year away. 2011 and 2012 are going to be years for me. Change is in the air, I can feel it, okay that might be the antihistamines I'm on for the allergies but damn, you know what I'm saying!