 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnock and it's National Craft Month, so I am going to make a play journal and show you how I painted the cover today. For National Craft Month, I thought it would be fun to try something different and I encourage you to do the same. I'm going to make a little sketchbook, a little journal. I'm calling it a play journal and this is a place I'm going to give myself permission to do crazy things I wouldn't normally try, especially with products that are in my craft room that I just haven't really used. And what I'm going to do is make this sketchbook and they're really easy to make. I'm using a half sheet of drawing paper and this is the drawing paper that I like to use with my colored pencils, but it's a little bit heavier than a super lightweight paper and the sheets of this stuff as well as watercolor paper are usually like 20 by 30. They're real giant sheets. So this is one of those big sheets cut in half and it's going to make small pages. My pages are going to be about four by six inches. Whatever size paper you start with is going to determine the finished size of your book. So you'll take the long ways on your sheet of paper and fold it in half and then fold each of those in half again so that you end up with four strips, basically three creases and four panels and you'll do the same thing the opposite direction. So fold it in half and then fold each of those halves into the middle. So you end up with nice creases along them, use your bone folder, etc. And then you'll have a grid of all of these. Now if you use a 12 by 12, you'll have square pages if you and they'll be tiny ones just let you know, but you can do this with a nice big sheet. So here's how you do the trimming to make it turn into a book. Two of those folds have the left three panels cut on them and then one of them has the right three panels. But you need to keep it in one giant serpentine. If you accidentally tear something you can always tape it back together but it's most helpful to just be able to do this right off the bat. So don't use paper that's too thin because it might not be able to handle it. So the very top one I cut through three panels and the middle one I'm cutting through the other three panels on the right hand side and then again off to the left for this bottom one. So I can make that giant serpentine out of the whole thing. And then all you have to do is fold them in a zigzag fashion. So whichever way you need to go back and forth you can also if you mess it up just lay it all flat again and then go back and refold it so that you get that zigzag going. And depending on what paper you use you can use both sides of it or if you have something that ends up bleeding through you can glue another piece of paper on the back or you can use some gesso, that sort of thing. With this drawing paper I don't know how it's going to handle a lot of gesso or water color grounds but I'm going to try it and see. And to make my cover and you don't have to make a cover but I'm going to make a cover on the front and back of mine I'm measuring my panels and then cutting a board that's going to be heavier for the cover of it and I'm using some B creative tape to glue these things together. The board that I used was from pads of arches water color paper. These backings on those pads are excellent for things like this. I have a whole stack of them because I love this cardboard it's really sturdy. So I'm just using two strips gluing it down and then this book you're going to have two directions you can play with it. If you're using mediums that don't bleed through like I said you don't have to worry about things bleeding through on the back so you have full use of both sides but there's pockets that it makes because of the way it folds so you can put tags in pockets you can do all different kinds of things whatever sort of thing you want to create here you can make it a scrapbook with pictures you can stamp in it you can do Bible journaling types of things in here you can just practice techniques do inking stuff all kinds of things. I wanted mine to have the feel of that mixed media look that I don't do very well and I just wanted to play with and I found these great stamps from picket fence aren't these beautiful. I've normally seen these in giant ones that are meant meant for journals big heads but these are card size so I can also use them for cards I found some sentiments that I might want to put in here encouraging things there's this mandala from paper rose and I went to my my drawer I have a drawer full of stuff and I have all these watercolor grounds and I wanted to use some of those there's so much stuff that I have I just never ever use so it's time so for this video I'm going to show you how I painted the garden on the front of my book and since this cardboard is so sturdy it can definitely handle what I'm going to do to it which is paint this garden using some black watercolor grounds first so watercolor grounds come in black transparent white and gold you can start with any one of them but I painted it on and it had a bunch of brush marks in it so I did some kind of pouncing with my little Tim Holt's tool and little swirling around to try to make it a little flatter and this is actually the second time I've painted it I painted it once and didn't like what I was doing so I started over again by repainting the whole thing in the black and what I decided to try this second time is putting some white down first this is the white watercolor grounds and if you don't have white watercolor grounds you could use some I guess acrylic paint it'll mush up a little bit once you start putting water in it but that will be okay for a garden but I'm going to paint kind of the highlights of each of my little clusters of flowers I'm not painting solid flowers I'm not trying to paint individual flower shapes just some flowers that are kind of kitty wampus in a garden and I'm trying to make sure that I have some areas that are going to stay black in here so I have some shadows and some that are really bright white and some that are lesser white and I can do that either by having less of the pigment on the brush or I can wet my brush a little bit and it will soften some of that the colors that I pulled out of my stash are duochrome hibiscus arctic fire emerald cabo blue and a little iridescent jade and that's just a few of the Daniel Smith colors that I think are going to be really pretty on this so now I'm going to paint over them and the areas where there's white underneath I get brighter color and then the areas where I paint off of that edge they're a little bit darker so I end up with this two tone for each one of the colors some of it is brighter purple and some of it's darker purple and they start looking a little bit dimensional that way which was kind of a fun thing that's what I discovered the first time I painted this and I tried just painting the flowers with no white under them and they looked really flat and I thought what happens if I put white underneath of them and so I did so that is what I'm doing here just kind of washing the colors around now as I'm doing my inside of my book all month long each day I'm going to try to do a panel because there's plenty of panels in here to cover the whole month of National Craft Month and I'm going to do different things each time sometimes I'll do Copic sometimes I'll use watercolor sometimes I might do some transparent grounds over top of my Copic and then do some watercolor on top of that see what happens some of my pages could come out terribly and some of yours as well if you really don't like it you want to do something else then glue a panel right over the top of it and just do something like that with it or paint some new watercolor grounds over it or just so over top of it and start that page again just give yourself permission to have fun and experiment and try something new because that's the way we learn and we grow some of the stuff that I do in this book may end up in video tutorials here on YouTube if I find something that works that's really interesting I might find that I want to do a class in some of these techniques there's all different kinds of things this could lead to but if I don't give myself permission to play then I'm not giving myself permission to learn and I find that rather than just haunting YouTube trying to find somebody else who's come up with something I love to just play with things and find out what can I discover what can I find and now that could be things other people have known for years I have the the picket fence little brushes now and I want to use those I want to do some techniques with inking in my book and I don't want to be following all the YouTube tutorials that are already out there I want to find something new and interesting things nobody's done before with those brushes I want to try just all the different things that are in the drawer I've already found a bunch of them that have dried out I never used them and they dried out and they're dead so I want to make sure that I get the best use out of all these wonderful products that I bought and never tried and that's what this whole month is going to be all about if you follow along on my Instagram and my Facebook I'm going to try to post every day one of the pages that I'm doing and give you a little bit of detail about what I might have used but I may save some of that because I'll put it in a whole video and at the very end of the month I might just do a quick flip through here on YouTube and talk about what I did and some of the fun things that I learned once I finished painting all of these layers onto my flower garden I ended up just putting a panel here on the top with my title play journal and I glued that on with some B creative tape and there you go look at all that shimmer and shine it looks different at an angle in the in the light when it's got all that it looks really heavy but when you're looking at it straight on without the light shining so directly on it it looks absolutely lovely and it's a whole lot of fun to just play with so that is it for today keep an eye on social media and I would love to see what you're doing go out and get yourself a big sheet of something that you want to play with and make yourself a journal or go buy a little journal that you can play around with and try new things and see what we can learn together this month make sure you use the hashtag play journal and I would love to see what you're creating thanks bye bye