 Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the RT Trio. This month Bea Grob created the mood board. This is it right here. You can get a copy of it over in our Facebook group for the RT Trio. I'll put a link down in the video description along with the videos for Bea and Mike Deacon. Not, not Maya, Bea and Mike. They are two separate people. Holy cow. Anyway, I I thought the color palette for this is pretty inspiring, pretty interesting. So these are the colors of paint I chose based on the mood board. And then a friend of mine shared a link with me and said have you ever heard of this and I said no and like last month's can you do an acrylic pour in an art journal? I thought I need to try that. It's this is my experiment journal in case you don't know where we try mixing colors and different art experiments and we're going to try another one in here. So like last time, we are going to work on this page and I am going to kind of consider this sort of warm gray color one of my colors. She does have this sort of gray-green color here on the mood board. I'm going to consider this that color and I'm going to paste the mood board over here. Now we are and this is a description of what we're doing that I'm going to paste in here, but I initially printed it so that I would remember what to tell you. So neuro graphic art, have you all heard of that? Or you like me and you've been living in a hole somewhere? It is relatively new, but it's not new-new. It's been around since 20 it doesn't say in here, but I want to say 2014 or something 2016. It was invented by a psychologist Pavel Piskarev. I'm sure I butchered that. I am sorry. He's a Russian psychologist and it is a way for him to help his patients work through their negativity and their issues with creativity. And he describes it as a creative method of transforming the world. It says authors method into interdisciplinary practice that allows you to make the necessary personal changes reliably, remove restrictions and successfully stimulate a new desired reality. What does that mean? So it's an art with no plan. So we are going to make some random shapes more often than not all of the art I've seen seems to start with circles, but you could probably start it any way you want. There are a million, well, not a million, a lot of videos are on YouTube about this kind of art and I will put the name of the type of art in the video description so you can Google them. I do have a couple videos that I've watched that I thought were kind of helpful. I will link to those too if I can remember if I forget you all let me know. I'm going to use some washi tape to sort of just mask off the border because I felt that would be fun. All of the videos that I watched start with circles, so we're going to do the same. I'm going to do my initial lines with black. Then we're going to color some of the shapes in. Then we're going to do some fine-tuning again with the black and some shadows with the gray. That's how I'm going to do it. It's all about creating some shapes and some harsh lines and intersections, but then softening those with curves and making everything curvy. If you think about when you're having a hard time and you're stressed out and things are just not pleasant like most of the world is right now. It's because things are harsh and sharp and transforming that into something that's softer and more manageable. That's where this art therapy comes. It really reminds me of the old wives saying make lemonade out of lemons. So that being that, I'm going to start with these are from some product packaging. I saved them from Christmas time. So I'm going to start with my black. This is one of my pit pens. This is a black pit pens. This is an F for fine, I think. And I'm going to trace around some of these shapes. This isn't the final line for these, so it doesn't matter if there's little boo-boos or like right over there. I hit my finger. That's fine. Okay, and then I'm going to take another one. I'm not going to think about it too much. I'm not going to plan out the design. I'm going to just let my mind to go where it needs to. That's like, but that's fine. I'm going to stick with circles. So you can literally just grab anything off your desk. Then I'm going to draw some lines. And I guess if you think about it, the lines might indicate your journey through the crazy madness. AKA the world right now. You all know what I mean. I know you do. Life is not a straight line. It's not an easy journey. It's all about the insane-ness. All right. Now, normally you would keep going with the lines and you would take all these sharp intersections and round them off. I am going to do that, but first I'm going to add some color. You're supposed to do it with like watercolors, which I guess I could do. But I kind of want to use these paints, so we're going to just do that. If I need a brush, those two are too big. Okay, we'll use this one. This will work. So I'm going to turn these, give these a little shake. These are matte acrylic paints, which are great for your art journals because they don't, they're not sticky. So when they dry, they don't like, you close the book, it doesn't stick to the other page and you don't have to worry about clear-coating it with wax or clear gesso or any of that stuff. So they're my preferred paints when I'm working in a journal, that matte acrylics, acrylic gouache, something like that. So I'm going to just actually, I don't need too much paint. I'm going to just use whatever paint is in the caps. Yeah, I'm going to pick a few shapes. I do have a smaller brush here in case I do need it. But because I'm not done with my lines, if I, again, if I put paint where I don't want it, I can just work with that, with the final shape in the lines. You might want the littler brush for the edges. Now ideally you would do this and you would be doing it in silence, not in front of the camera, maybe with some music on or if you like prayers or chanting or some other meditative sound. But of course I'm insane and I'm doing it in front of the camera because why not? So I'm going to keep doing this and I'm going to fill my shapes in, but just like with the shapes I'm not thinking about it too much. I'm just putting the paint on in the first place that the brush touches and letting it be what it needs to be. Hopefully working out the stress while I'm doing it because boy has how he has this year been stressful already. I'm barely got started. Okay, so I'm going to keep going. I'm going to speed forward through this part so you don't have to watch me at nauseam and I'll be right back. Okay, I'm going to take another hit pen. This is a another black one and this is a B. I think just a standard brush. It's like a hard tip brush. It's not a soft tip though. And we are going to go back over our lines that we made earlier. That's going to be better. And by we y'all know I mean me, right? All right, so I'm going to go back over all my lines like this. While I'm doing that when I have a couple that intersect, like right here, it's about taking all these hard edges in and making them softer, right? Rounder. So we're going to do that everywhere they meet. Okay, so I'm going to do that through the whole thing. Again, I'm going to speed forward through the process. I'll be right back. Of course, it could stop there, but I want to add some shadow, some depth. So I'm going to take this other favorite castile pit pen and this is in warm gray 272, which is one of my favorite shadow colors. And I'm going to add shadow to this side of all the shapes like this. You might find on the painted sections that you have to add a couple layers of a pit pen because it's going to take that pen in a slightly different way than the raw paper will if you're doing this like I am. It just gives it kind of an added extra dimension. And because this is a brush tip, I can, you know, go lightly on the paper, press down harder to get a thicker line. I can be intentionally uneven about it to make it more interesting. And just again, it just gives it some depth. The purple and the blue doesn't show up. Much. So I'm going to go over those a couple of times. I don't know if this will work, but right here in this lower orange piece, it looks like I got too much of that. I pushed too hard on the pen, so. Oh yeah, it does. So the baby wipe, if I catch it, because this is alcohol ink, it's going to take a little bit too dry. So there we go. That actually works. Okay. So I was able to just lift some up. Make it not so dark. There you go. I like that. Okay. So now we're going to take off the washi tape. If you have extra washi tape that you kind of don't like, that's not like your favorite color. It's good for doing things like this because it will rarely rip your paper, whereas masking tape and painter's tape will sometimes do that. And you have to get a heat gun to them so that they come off clearly. Just FYI. Look at that. That is cool. OK, so we're going to open this, though. Not done yet. And I need my glue stick. See, I'm going to have one over here. This one will work. This one will work. And we're going to glue our mood board over here. I'm going to glue the information about the neuro graphic part. I keep wanting to call it neuropathic, but that's not it. It's neuro graphic. Take a gift card and push these down into the glue. This glue goes on blue, but it will dry clear. I use a Yoohoo glue stick, by the way. It's my favorite one. I'm going to take my favorite big pen and I'm going to write the paints I've used and the markers I've used down here at the bottom. I'm also going to do little swatches of the paint, which is something I do a lot in this journal. So I'm going to take and just put little swatches of the paint colors. Then I have sort of a starting point and notes to go by, which is the whole idea behind this book. Now, this book is made with heavy duty, mixed media paper and or watercolor paper, really thick stuff. And it's a handmade book. So I bought the paper and then I used my binding machine, my very underutilized binding machine to make my own journal, which is definitely a way to do it. But you do you and you use what you have. And if you're like me and you have a large selection of mixed media paper, don't go by a journal. Just make one. You don't have to have a binding machine. You get just punch holes in it and use binder rings or sew it or something. All right. So neuro, neuro graphic art. I almost said neuropathic again, but neuro graphic art. I really love the way it turned out. I can see me doing this again. And I when I was doing the majority of the pen work, I didn't have the music on. I didn't have a YouTube video on. It was quiet in here. I was thinking about life and things lately that have just been kind of sideways. You know what? It really helped me work through some of that. I really like it. It's a it's a good idea, I think. So anyway, check it out. Don't forget to go see what Bea and Mike did this this month. We'll see you in our Facebook group, sharing what you've done. The link for the Facebook group is down in the description below, along, of course, with Mike and Bea's links, like I said, make sure that we see your post in the group. Don't forget to tag us one or all. And we would love to see what you do. Answer questions, offer support, all of those things. So go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. Like playing your art journal. And I will see you in the next video. Bye, guys.