I’ve been watching Drewscape_Art on youtube for a few years. I started watching him because he was making some sweet pens by hand. He doesn’t do that anymore but his illustration career took off. His art style is really cool and deceptively simple. Think Ivan Brunetti or my hero, Linda Barry. He also does great things with color. He combines his hand drawn art with interesting effects in Procreate. When I watch his videoes where he uses Procreate I have some serious iPad FOMO. Which frankly, is saying something since I’m an Android and Windoze person 100%, but a small part of me wants to use Procreate.

Anyway, Andrew posts a lot of videos about creativity and making comix. I think a lot of what he posts directly relates to art journaling. One of his recent videos was about a warm up exercise where you draw random comix panels on a page and then fill it with random blobs and scribbles of midtone ink wash. You then use these shapes to pull images out of. You look and decide what you see, then add in more lines and details until you have a page. you can add words if you’d like. In this particular video he cuts words out of a piece of junk mail. Nifty.

I have to admit I’ve been hooked on this since I watched the video. I had to immediately try this out for myself and oh man has it been bringing me some creative joy. It’s a lot of fun.

First the random panels are pretty random and then you fill them with loose watery ink or watercolor or other media. It’s very freeing to do. Then you let your mind be child-like and creative and play as you see things in the shapes. Then you add in details and maybe more color.

as you can see from the two images above, the materials you use really has an impact on the looseness of the page. IN this case I used paint sticks and they have a rough quality. they are hard to control and eliminate the possibility of details. When using them you have to wait to add in the detail. It’s an exercise in patience.

This page was made with my 2 ink wash brushes. One has a light mid tone and the other a much darker mid-tone. I brushed on the light mid-tone and then dabbed in the darker mid-tone. No plan, just sticking to streaks and circles.

This ended up being a page I photocopied and shared withthe kids I worked with. I had them use it for the basis of their own spread. Asking them to look to see what they saw in the blobs and streaks. they then used sharpies to create their images. I’ve done this exercise with a couple of different groups of kids and the results are wild and different every time. And it’s the same for me. See my 2 sessions with photo copies of this page.

Two very different pages that began the same. Nifty.

This page started out with panels and ink wash flicked across a wet page. Each panel was wet with a brush then ink flicked across the page to create the loose cloud like areas. I then blobbed on some pink watercolor and let that flow as well. as I brought out the details I wanted to add in the idea of people being sucked into the mouth, so I stared by drawing stick figures then realized I could just do dots. So I flicked more ink wash across the page. While the paper is dry the ink wash doesn’t spread out, it stays in a loose dot.

I have recorded a lot of this process in a few videos that will come out across the month of November. I haven’t captured all of them but I’ve been making more and more of these pages.

They bring me so much joy but each page tells a story of my life in that day, just like any other art journal page.

I’ve scanned and cleaned up an image of the page that I have used with my groups of kids, if you want to try this in your own art journal feel free to download the PDF and print it to make your own Drewscape_art comix inspired page.

Get a downloadable version suitable for printing here: https://ko-fi.com/s/8389c4d952

Available as a high quality PNG and PDF.