 here for another video from my creative year and this is the August tutorial. I'm going to bring you a little bit of a different video. It's not going to be a art tutorial specifically or a journal page specifically. We're going to talk about this little book. So I've been sharing this on social media and I've been asked repeatedly, please share what you're doing and why you're doing it. So this is what we're here about. This is a moleskin cahier. I leave links for the products that I can in the description below for you all. Now the moleskin cahier has sort of thinnish paper. It's great sketching paper. It does have some bleed-through even with acrylic, I mean sorry ballpoint pen, some like ghosting. It's not great for, don't even try watercolor because yeah it's just going to make a mess and it's going to pill and it's going to go right through the paper and I mean you can like spray the whole thing with acrylic sprays or do something with you know water paint, watercolor paints but you're going to have to be really gentle with it and it's just to be honest it's not worth the bother. If you were going to try something really wet in here cover the background before you do anything else with a clear gesso or a watercolor ground because the paper is not intended for water media. Okay that all being said I prefer to work in small journals. I prefer to work in journals with this type of paper for general mixed media work. The moleskin cahier is one of my favorite journals to do sketching in, to do this kind of work in that we're going to talk about. I also use moleskin journals like old moleskin planners for in our journal. Here's one right here. Let me see. Here's one right here that I'm working on and this is a 2017-2018 weekly notebook. The pages, this is, you can tell right here, the pages wrinkle up. They don't hold, this needs to be waxed. They don't hold the water media well. I need to put wax paper in there but I think they're fun and challenging to work with and I like that these already have like calendar things printed on the background. I find that interesting. So that's just me work in what you enjoy working in but I think for this kind of book the moleskin cahier works very well and it's not too big so you don't have to store it. So this is what I'm calling, this is a reference book, a personally created for me myself and I reference book. So in the old days of creativity, I would use these. I still do occasionally. You notice I have them labeled. These are obviously just, these two are stacked together. These are just school notebooks. There we go. These are just school notebooks and I started these a long time ago and I've talked about them on my channel before and I would take images from nature that I took pictures of, things off of the internet or out of magazines and I would just tape them in here with scotch tape and these are my personal like image reference books. I don't do as much of this anymore but I do still occasionally and I still have these hanging around because when I want to create something and I'm sort of stuck for an image, for a painting or a composition, these really work for me and I get tired of looking around on the internet to be honest with you. However, I wish I had done them the other way that I'm doing these other ones. You'll see I have, like I said, I have lots of different textures. Lots of different categories. That one's textures. Landscapes. Like all kinds of things. Cities and architecture. Animals and insects. This one doesn't have nearly as much in it as buddhas and mermaids. Somewhere I have one. I started way back in like 2005. Hang on. This is the one that started it all. Way back when and I was still sewing at the time and I wanted to collect reference images and material and create sort of my own personal reference library. This was back before Pinterest. I barely got started on the internet if I was even on there at all and I would collect images out of magazines at random and I would paste them in here. Some of these are out of magazine. This is actually wrapping paper and these are great for shape and say some material design, composition, color, but I really, as I was thinking about these, really wanted to take them one step further and part of me is actually tempted to take these apart and create them into the other books that I'm doing now. But I don't think I'm going to do that. I even would put paint chips in here. I think I'm going to just leave these the way they are. If there are some images in here that I think I want to put in the other book, I think I'll just make a copy. You can see that I started with the paint chips doing what we're going to do in the other book. That's a clue right there. There are some vintage pieces in here that I would pick up and then maybe want to use a copy of that in a collage or something. There are all sorts of images. Anyway, I have a lot of these. It's fun to look through them. I could spend all day doing that. I decided recently that I would take that one step further and I really wanted to make an inspiration journal for myself that had to do with not only images of shape and form that would inspire compositions and collages either in my art journals or on canvas, but that would also inspire me as far as color is concerned and color themes are concerned. I put together this one. I'm calling it Color Inspirations. I skipped the first page because I knew I wanted to be a title page. I also wanted to put a guide at the bottom for what my different abbreviations mean to myself so I would remember someday when I'm looking at this going media. What did I mean by media? Oh, yeah, that Dina Wakeley paint. At the time the inspiration for this came about, I was calling some more magazines, pulling images for collage maybe or to add inspiration. I decided with some of the images I found, I'd like to take it a step further. I'd like to save the image and I'd also like to pick paint colors from my stash that I'm inspired by in the image and I started with this one. I really thought that I really thought by looking at this image that I wanted to be inspired by the image itself. There we go. In shape but also color. And I wanted these images to give me color inspiration for composition. So say I wanted to create something in my journal or on canvas that had greens and browns in it. What other colors could I use in it that would really help it pop? Well, if I refer back to this journal, I know I could use teals and turquoise, little bit of gray white and some kind of pale yellow color would really, really make it pop. And then I just started going from there and I found more and more images to do this with. I also found pretty early on that if I took one of my homemade stamps or objects I stamped with dipped in all the colors, I could see what they look like all together. So I took this piece of cardboard packaging material, and I started stamping it into the colors and adding that mark to all the pages, which has turned out really well. So I've created all of these different pages inspired by these images that I found in different magazines and things. And I've created my own inspiration of color based on that original image. I also have made sure to notate where the image came from, what it's called and who the artist is, if I know, and if I can find that if it's in the magazine or wherever I have accumulated that image from. And I will show you more examples of that. And it's really led me to some interesting places like, for instance, this particular color theme has no teal in it, which is usually my go-to color. But I got to tell you, while I may not paint this exact composition, I cannot wait to use this color theme in something. It's a departure for me, but I think it would be a lot of fun. So I found a bunch of painting images. And then I found that I had some inspiration clipboards in a different place here in the art room. And they had sets of images on them. Some were from paint chips, some were things I printed that I took with my phone. This particular one had a random Pinterest quote on it. I decided to take those things off the clipboards and put them in this book and use them for color inspiration, making sure to take note if I knew where these images came from. And if they were like from Lowe's paint chip images, I put that on there. If it was something taken with my camera, I put that on there. And so then I came up with these and we have another one to do today. So this is a collection of images. These two are taken from my back patio of the Sunset Sky Stormies. In both cases, it was storming. And then these two are from paint chips from Lowe's. So then based on this collection of images that I think are interesting together, I have pulled a collection of paints that I think I need to I need to clip this open at this point because it's getting a little bulky that I think represent these collection of images decently well. So we are going to I'm going to show you exactly what I do, not that it's rocket science or anything. So one of the other things I found bonus painting paper. So this is a new newsprint pad from notepad from Muji. But just any random old pad of paper next to you, you're going to want that. I have a pallet plate, let's zoom out just a little bit. There we go. And I've got my paint in front of me. So we've got the Dina Wakley media paint in white. You only need a little bit. And then Dekawart Americana paints. Those are the two brands I'm mainly using. So this one is Americana and Cadmium Yellow. Make sure to shake up that Americana paints. They do tend to separate if they've been sitting for a while. We media paint in tangerine media paint in magenta. As I'm calling out the colors, you could look at the images here and see what you think about my choices. Americana and primary red. Media paint in fuchsia. Americana and true blue. And Americana and paints gray. So one thing I do is I stand all the paints up. You can kind of see part of the bottle there off just off camera in front of me. I turn the labels to face me so that after I do the swatches, I can make note of exactly what the colors were. Let's move the coffee so I don't get paint water in the coffee, shall we? Got some brushes. And then I just make some swatches of color. And then I wipe my brush off on the newsprint. And I go down my lip, my row of colors. Now once you make this swatch book, and you have a few images under your belt, you can use it to, like I said before, get inspiration for themes of color, composition, shape and form in not only your art journals, but your canvas, if you are doing canvas work or some kind of wall art. And you don't have to just use it for acrylic paint inspiration. This is just color inspiration. So you could take take this page and use it to inspire colors of colored pencil, marker, water color, you have the colors here, you can match those or pair those up with colors of other products that you have on your stash. We're just doing it in acrylic paint because that holds up really well on this paper and you'll get a nice bright pop of color. Okay, so I'm going to put that in the water. Then I'm going to take my big crystal pen. And next to each swatch, I'm going to write the name or abbreviated name of the brand of paint and then the color. I like that. Then I'm going to take my little scrap cardboard, find a place somewhere to stamp it, like maybe here. Sometimes I don't get as good oppression as I want. So then I go with a thin brush, or I don't have all the colors represented. At the same time, I don't want it to be perfect. That's better. So then I would just let that dry. And that's a good addition to my color inspiration book. But then what do you do with all this? That's where this comes in. So then I'm going to take my same piece of cardboard or whatever you're using to make marks. I'm going to use up the paint, and I'm going to make some painting papers that I can use in other artwork, maybe even the one that's inspired by that particular page in the color inspiration journal. So this month, I want you to focus on creating your own style, creating your own reference material, trying something unique and different. Your art is worthy of your voice. And I want you to prove it this month. So I would just keep going with that until I ran out of paint or it was done making marks, and then that's it. So this month, I am working on color inspiration and really developing my style and giving it more of a voice. I want you to do the same. If you're not part of my creative year and you want to be, the link is in the description below. I can't wait to see what the other teachers bring this month at the time of filming this were at the end of July. So I don't have any idea what they're doing. None of us have talked about it. So I think it's going to be a fun month. But again, the theme for the month over my creative year is style and the challenges month is worthy. So I want to see what you do with that. And I can't wait. I am going to explore my voice and my style in things like this color inspiration journal. And I can't see wait to see where this leads me. I also can't wait to see what you all do with the prompts this month. Anyway, if you'd like to see what we're doing over there, go and join if you would like to follow me on social media and see what I'm up to down a daily basis creatively, or support the free content here on YouTube here on YouTube or over on Facebook and the art groups. There is a link tree link in the description below which when you click on it, you're going to find all my social media sites, places where you can support the free content here on YouTube and all of that stuff. So give it a peruse and look don't forget to like share and subscribe and above all go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.