 Hey everybody, how are you? Hang on, let me get this all set up so it's working correctly. There we go. I am so going to need to see what we're doing. I can't zoom in on this so don't even ask me. So this is just a bonus live video share. I was watching a video by my friend and help her in the Facebook groups. She's our happiness ambassador over in my Facebook group, A Life of Art and Self-Expression, Lisa Swank. She really inspired me to re-share some old journals of mine when I was watching her video. Now, I do think I've shared all or most of these already on YouTube, but honestly, I have like 1200 videos on my YouTube channel and it's easier to just re-share with you guys. I don't know Nancy, Mimi, Amy, welcome, and I don't know. Mine says 12 are watching. Maybe Nancy, you just need to refresh. I wouldn't worry about it though if you're getting a clear picture and hearing me alright and seeing the chat, I wouldn't worry about it too much. So I was watching Lisa's video and I've been watching a few videos, especially with people who are new to mixed media. They're kind of self-conscious and unsure and sometimes we all have this idea in our head that when you start art, you need to immediately come right out of the gate and be fabulous at it. That's just so not true. All of us create crap. I can't even sit down for this because these are so big. All of us create crap or, you know, we practice and things, you know, we love the piece that we created, but is the best piece of artwork? No, but you know, it's just about having fun with the process for most of us. And this came about because I was watching, hey Jerry, I was watching Lisa Swank's video now over in my Facebook group and my three sister Facebook groups, which are all listed in the description below, my arts and parts owned by Jerry Bellini who just came on, hey, artsy endeavors owned by Cindy Sine's Utter and Annalisa's mixed media everything owned by Ann Williamson. We all four of our groups are doing a free year-long journaling program based around the idea of travel journaling, but it doesn't have to just be for that. And I was watching Lisa's video and I loved her video, but it really made me want to share these old journals because this program especially is not about doing this journal any particular way. The reason I have four different helping me and our admins and some of my design team members for the 2017 design team all doing videos is because we all do it a little separate way. Wanda's one of them, she just came on, hey Wanda. Okay, so because we all do it a different way, we all have our unique style and this idea of journaling our year or travel journaling is going to meet a little different something to each one of us who's doing it. And I really wanted you to not just hear my voice but to hear their voice and I wanted it to be free. So it's going to be free but the hitch is you won't be able to see it here on YouTube. You have to go over and you have to join one or all of the Facebook groups to get the videos because the links will only be shared there and the prompts they won't be shared anywhere else. This is probably one of the few announcements you're going to see about it here on YouTube. So that's the spiel. So after the broadcast you can find the description and you can go and join all the Facebook groups if you do Facebook. If you don't do Facebook, maybe you just want to do it for this and not tell anybody in your family you do Facebook. I can understand why you wouldn't want to tell them you do Facebook. I love my family if you're watching but yeah, I can get that. And Linda, hello. Okay, so these are my old journals. And just like Lisa, I'm watching her videos and she's talking about how all her journals are really big when she first got started. She bought these really big notebooks. These are, look at these. Lisa, I totally get it because I did the same thing. This is the very first journal. We'll do this one first. I have to move these. They're so big. Okay, so this is the very first journal I did. I knew nothing about mixed media. I didn't know about online classes. I didn't know about anything. And I think this is 2012. I think it's 2012. This I made when I was taking a class from Tracy Bautista. Holy cow, if she doesn't know, if you don't know who she is. She has a few short videos here on YouTube. Look her up. She sells a lot of really great interesting courses. I love her. She's one of my favorite teachers from mixed media. All right. So this is a journal I made in part of her class. And this is really big. It's made out of an old box. It's made with painted canvas. I bound it with ribbons and feathers and beads and yeah, this is huge. This one, do I even have a ruler I can measure it with? Let's see. Hold on. I got to find my tape measure. All right. So this journal is, this is, I know they're huge, aren't they? So this one from spine to edge measures 19 and a half by 16. It's gigantic. I don't make journals generally this big anymore. But when I first got started, I didn't know what I was doing. Shh. Don't tell anybody. And I'll have to tell you, there's a little bit of drawing here, but not too much. I was also reading Susie Blue's book. And one where she does the faces. Anybody know what that one's called? I don't remember. All right. Let's pick a peek inside. I didn't know anything about waxing pages or anything. And this journal is made with different kinds of art paper, packing paper, brown craft paper, like there's all kind of stuff in here. This is one of the little faces from Susie Blue's book that I did on a piece of book text. And then I pasted it in. All of my pages have words on them. That's something that still holds true today that a lot of my pages have words on them. This up until recently wasn't waxed at all. You would open it and all the pages would crack. Because anybody, any of you that know have been doing mixed media for a while, you know, you need to stick wax paper in here or you need to spread some wax on the pages like Daddy Van's Bees Wax, which we all love. Thanks, Shannon Green, for telling us all about it. When Claudia Rossi was here last, before she moved to Hawaii, she was looking at this and all the pages were stuck together. And so she very nicely unstuck them and waxed them. Hey, Sharon. So none of these pages, they're okay. They're not fabulous, but they're okay. Mixed media girls by Susie Blue. That's it. I was also watching Donna Downey's Watercolor Wednesdays. Can you tell? There's still some cracking going on. This is reminding me. I don't have to take my typewriter in to have it be serviced. You have to like whack on the keys to get it to type well. But these aren't, you know, great compositions or anything. They're okay. They're not done at special art paper. This is just brown craft paper and packing paper for the most part. I can hear that I still need to whack some of them. Can you tell? It's not as bad as it used to be. I like this. Don't look back. You're not going that way. I like that. Hey, Sharon. I think I said that already. But I was watching Lisa's video and I just, and I've been watching a few videos. And you all think you have to be perfect with your art and do things this way. When you're learning, that's not true. And who says anything needs to be a particular way? I love this journal, but it's certainly not a fine art or anything. Don't you just love this page? All of these pages have been photographed by my daughter. And some of them I still print and use for backgrounds. This would be one of them because don't you just love that page? This was really a great study in backgrounds. Here are all the creaking. Things are falling on my table. Hey, Janet. We're just sharing some old work. And I have to tell you, this is the book with very little work I hate in it. What do you see with some of the other ones? I always tell you guys that no creaking. They need wax in there. If I always tell you guys when you're practicing faces, if you're going to mess up a face, just try to draw your own. Because if you're going to mess up a face, you might as well do your own because you can't really get mad at yourself. Wait till I show you. There's a reason I show you that. Hey, Asma. So that's what happens when you have lots of Mod Podge and acrylic paint and things kind of stick together a little bit. And you need to wax the pages. I do recommend that on these, I use a lot of different kinds of materials. Not all of them are archival. And this is why I tell you guys if you have pages in a book like this that you love, photograph them or scan them. I know there is something kind of meditative about that creaking sound, right, Jerry? There's another Susie Blueface. And there's some, like I said, pages like this that I've had photographed that I just love to use as other background. I print it and then, you know, read it as collage paper. This is, I believe, yes, it's one signature, one giant signature. Look, I did not know how to make a book. And I put the signature in the cover and I pulled it up tight, arranged it how I wanted, put bulldog clips and clamps to keep all of it together. And then I used my, oops, I'm knocking things off my table. It's so big. I used my hand drill because I have a cordless, a wireless drill to actually, while everything was clipped together, I drilled holes, three holes through the cover, the fabric, the signature and everything. And then I did the sewing and binding and I just kind of made it up. This is not an actual sewing technique. I just made it up. I wanted it to wrap around this way and go around that. I made it up. But yeah, it's one giant signature. Do what you love. We should all be doing what we love if you're not why. I used, and I still have some of this old bank notes and stock certificates, expired ones, of course. And I drew faces and things on them and put them in here. The center is here. So you can, oops, you can see that the center is here. You can see the fabric and stuff right there. So I didn't know anything about art journaling. I discovered about art journaling from doing this book. And as I was doing this book, I discovered life book. And I was taking it. I decided to take a few other art classes and thought I would keep doing them in a journal, do the practice in a journal. I didn't know that was actually a thing. This was right around the time I got hurt at work. So I needed to do something with my time. Here we go. This is a good one. Cherish those who lift your soul. Or cherish, yeah, that's so important. Now these quotes on here are not mine. These are usually things I found on the internet. I had no confidence in my writing abilities at the time that I created this. And this is the biggest journal that I own. I'm restarting my picture because it's doing something weird. There we go. This is one that, if you've been following me for a while, you've seen this one before. This is another one that I've reused on some things. And like I said, my daughter is a photographer. I've said that before and I had her photograph this whole thing after it was completed. And this is just kind of grungy, scribbly, graffiti style. I wasn't trying to draw anything. There's no other than the Susie blue faces. There's no me trying to draw anything in here. So whether you're doing your journaling, just to do journaling, you're doing it as part of a class or you're doing our free journaling program next year or tomorrow, you should just do it your way and have fun with it. There's no particular way or size that it needs to be. There is something fun about working in a huge gigantic journal. And again, this is packing paper. And this packing paper I used to get at work and things would come wrapped in it and this paper was trashed. So I would just straighten it out, fold it flat and bring it home. And stick it in my journal. Pile folders. And this brown craft paper is from Dollar Tree. So you can get a roll of brown craft paper at Dollar Tree for a dollar. Dare to dream. Creaking noise. Geez, it's so loud. I don't, the other ones shouldn't be as bad because by the time I finished this one, I realized that was a problem and I started sticking wax paper in between the pages. This is the first time that I wrote anything that I've since repeated. Choose to use your wings. And I don't remember where that came from. It may be mine, but I don't think it is. I think I got it from somewhere. Piece of hang and paper. I'm going to have to stick some tape on that. Just, it's just, I mean, you could just fill up a journal with this and it's just yummy. Stick a couple of little bits on there and you're good. It's so big. I just laugh. I laugh looking at it because it's so big. I get trouble getting it off the bookshelf from the front room. It always seems impossible till it's done. I thought that was a good quote for the back of this book because I never thought I'd finish it. Now, I hope you're all wanting to stick around. I got two more of these huge things. All right. So these were both done in 2013. I was taking some other classes and I decided that I would do all of Life Book in one and all of everything else in the other one. So these are two Canson XL Mixed Media Journals and they have slip-on covers. Let's see if I can get the cover off. Yeah. So it's an 11 by 14 Canson XL and this was definitely something and you can tell this cover has been on here. It's all got crumbs inside. This was one of those at Michael's Buy One Get One Free. Thanks. So that's why I had two of them. They're huge and they're fun to work in but they're huge. Yeah. Well, be just be glad my Melinda is not barking because normally I start doing these live broadcasts and mine starts barking and he's right on the other side of my office window. So in this one I got smart about the creaking and I stuck wax paper in here. I always intended to go back and wax the pages once I found out about Daddy Vance and I just never did. Wax paper is just going to live in here. These are not fine works. These are works of art. These are just me experimenting with what I like, what I don't and having fun with the process. Do what you love, love what you do. I realized right from the start that kind of quotes were going to be my thing. Oh, thank you, Jerry. Yeah, I still love bright colors. And this is where I kind of start to incorporate some faces, drawing some faces, experimenting with some things. And at the same time I'm doing this, I'm taking Lifebook and I can tell you just by looking at this. I don't remember what was going on that day but that obviously wasn't probably a great day because I wasn't, yeah, I was working out that problem. Hey, Corey. I was taking true free spirit and a few things from different people. So some of that work is in here. This was, I don't remember, Pauline Agnew maybe. I should have put notes on here but I didn't. This was the year where I was really experimenting with drawing things, especially faces, from a few different kinds of people to really figure out what my style was, what was going to make me happy. But right away from the beginning, my message to myself was about positivity and loving yourself as you can tell. There's one of my first faces that I started with. Thanks. You can see the progression but towards the end, one of these books towards the end, I was taking more of a fine art class and not just our journaling class. I just kind of discovered the difference and I started practicing drawing. Sometimes unsuccessfully. You know, I was trying to be something that I'm not and there's nothing wrong with giving it a shot but if it doesn't make you happy, it doesn't make you happy. This is a page that's all collage. I did it for a class I was taking online, a fine art class through at college and my niece loved this so much that I had to reproduce it for her because I wasn't going to, I don't, this has got something on the backside so I wasn't going to rip it out of my journal. I don't do that. This is a 2013 journal. This is an old journal. So I was, Cory, I was watching Lisa Swank's video about our new journaling program and I won't explain it again but you can go back and watch the replay later and I was inspired to share my old journals. I'm hoping that you guys all get some inspiration and confidence about seeing what I did in the beginning. This is mostly acrylic paint because I had set aside my watercolors for a while and, yeah, there we go. That's just so bad. But I was just practicing. There's one of my face. Yeah, this is mostly acrylic. I had put aside my watercolors for kind of for a while. Every now and then there would be a colored pencil or something thing in here but I had kind of not done anything with the water. I didn't for some reason it didn't occur to me. You could do watercolors in this journal. I don't know why. There is a video on my channel called the good, the bad, and the ugly and it's just about some faces that I've done including mine. So I'm not so good. So you should probably go see that next. I love this page. There's just something about the layers of marks and the drips and the splats and the pen and the love that. Stop trying to control everything. Learn to just be. I still have problems with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 53, it'll always be an issue. Because yes, I'm probably a type A. So here's where I start really practicing with charcoal. I was taking one of Pauline's Agnews classes and we were just making marks. She's a fabulous teacher by the way if you're looking for a new class to take next year. I was also doing, this reminds me, I was doing anyone's secrets. That's another art online mix media course that you can take. I think now it didn't used to be downloadable but I think now you can download it. There we go. There we go. That's my face in charcoal. One of the first faces in charcoal. Hey Joy. Hey Janet. This is my first one of my first experiments in image transfer. I don't know. There's a couple more in here I think. I was practicing. I don't even know if this one has fixative on it because I don't even know if I knew about fixative at that point. Blind contour drawing, that's my first try at it. Here's another image transfer. I was trying image transfer a couple different ways. This was with gel, hand gel, hand sanitizing gel and it kind of worked. I put some notes at the bottom. I didn't have enough on there. Hey Narda. Hey Mama Cats. Here are some more practices with drawing different things in charcoal. Just trying to be free with my marks. That was still my really tight wound up with my mark making. I wasn't making me happy. I was getting very frustrated. There's another image transfer experiment. This by the way is my grandfather and he's in the California Conservation Corps. Anyway color experiments. I started following Agnes course and we were working with color and mixing colors. There's only red, violet, white and black in some and blue, violet and yellow and others. There's a lot of other colors in there but I mixed all these colors in a couple of different colors of paint and I wrote it on there. If you're going to try something like this you should write it on there because later you'll want to know what colors those were. There's another one. We all got to start somewhere and I love her. There's something about her I love but you can see that always my girls always have this big full lift look. They always have and I don't know where that came from but they always have. I still love working with charcoal but it is messy. This was drawing on the paper I was looking in the mirror. I wasn't actually looking at the paper and I was trying to draw what I saw in the mirror without looking at it. That was a lesson. That was pretty fun. Again, my face, not that you would know that. It looks very Picasso-esque. This was another lesson I don't remember from what class but in a darker tone and a lighter tone. I don't remember what class now. I had the girls sign it. This is a still life drawing class I did with a local Girl Scout troop and we drew an apple. I had all the girls who were taking the class with me sign the two pages and these were the demo ones I did with them. That was fun. There we go. It's fun to look back at these and see how far you've gotten where you've been and revisit some things that you forgot about colors or mark making. There's all kinds of stuff on this page. I was just having a lot of fun. Here we go. There is something to be said for working in like I said in a big journal but you have to... This is not one you can take with you. Jelly prints. This one was foiling with a glue that I found out since doing this page stays sticky. It never is not sticky. This piece of paper has to forever be in here but this is nail foil. This time I would use what do you call it the special glue for foiling things. I wouldn't use different glue. Pages are stuck together. There we go. Just mark making. I hope you do. That's one of the reasons that I'm doing this. Here's another one where I use that same glue and it just stays sticky. I think this is not Jane Davenport. Who's the other one? She's Australian. She does a lot with twinkling H2Os. This one is from her too. I don't remember her name. That's so bad. That was Mini Murphy Lace Field. That's another one from that same person. I don't remember. This one is twinkling H2Os and some acrylic paint and then sparkly stuff is stickles. There's another face. If you're going to practice faces and mess one up you might as well just do your own. Bonus, you'll get to know your own face really well. Another one. A couple of random backgrounds. She's cute. I like this page. I've always liked this page. The eyes have it. You get it? My lips are sealed. I think there's one in here. I did it with my husband. He doesn't like it because he made him look like Santa Claus. I think it's in this one. He's blonde and instead of using a light yellow for his hair, I used white. I don't know why I chose that. No, that's not it, Jerry. I love these two pages. I'm looking at this and I was trying to think the other day what I was going to use on this year's Christmas card. Maybe I'll photograph one of these. That would be a cool Christmas card. That might have to be doodle flowers. If you're all a part of Crazy Island Family you recognize the doodle flowers? Practicing drawing eyes and charcoal. I was practicing combining magazine collage with painted backgrounds. I don't remember what kind of paint that was. I'm not going to even try. I don't remember. There's another one. You could just take sections of this and use that as collage paper in another journal. These books are got a lot of pages in them. I think there's 60 pages in each book. Here's some figure studies and charcoal. That's what I thought. I just thought of that. I might have to do something about that. I may have some 2012 ones around here somewhere. These are the ones I could find. These are the ones I grabbed when I had the impulse to do this. That stuck together. We're going to leave it. That's ink. I think these are inks. These aren't watercolors. I think they're inks. Oh, the Cranky Crafter. I still love that name. I'm just sharing some of my old journals. I was inspired by watching Lisa Swank's video for our new journaling program over in the Facebook groups. You can catch up to the beginning after we're done. I don't want to bore everybody with explaining it again. This is Life Book for 2013. I do think there's a 2012 one around here somewhere. Hold on. I don't know. I can't find it. It's around here somewhere. That's a good lesson from here. A great lesson from here. Put notes in your journals because I didn't. Now I don't remember. This is Life Book 2013. This might be the first year that I did Life Book. Maybe. Again, this is a huge journal. Lots of experimenting. I barely knew what our journaling was. That was a fun lesson. But the lesson in this is just experiment and have fun working whatever size journal is going to make you happy. Don't be afraid to practice and try and maybe make crap because you're learning your craft. We've all been there. Done that. If you want to get better at what you're doing, take some classes. There's some good ones out there. But I didn't know about waxing the pages at this time. That's why all of the wax paper is in here. I decided not to draw myself this time and then I would just paste me in. I got tired of messing up my face. This was a fun one using acrylic skins to create the stained glass. So just be confident about who you are and what you want to learn. You don't have to be an insane, crazy nut job like I am and share all of your artwork on the internet on YouTube. But have confidence enough in yourself to just express yourself however you need to in your journals. However it is, it's beautiful. It doesn't matter. I loved this lesson where I just drew my eye. That was the best I ever got at doing a realistic eye at that time. The stained glass one was fun. That was a life book lesson. That was a lot of fun. There's a lot of pockets and things in here. Notes to myself. This is this I first discovered washi tape in 2013. I did not know what washi tape was. I didn't know what a jelly plate was. I've been taking some art class in 2012 and I remember the first time somebody said we're going to do a mono print using a jelly plate and I went, I what? A jelly what? I didn't know what that was. I made up for it now. I think I have a few of them. I'm going to show you how I made those. Just listen. That's a good one. Obviously this day I was this is 2013. This was right after I got hurt at work. This was not a great year. I had some difficult days. That's what I can say about that. That's a good one. I learned from Tracy to make photo copies or scans of some of my older journal pages and use those as collage pages paper and future works. It's a great idea, something I still do. This one was interesting if you open up. This is supposed to be like hands. I don't think it really looks like hands but I haven't done any journals since then that are this big because these are just too big. They're definitely something if you're going to do that you want to just do when you're in the studio. If you're going to take a round with you like if you're going to do our free journaling course next year and you're going to do it in a way that you can take it with you wherever you're going. This is nice. This is not the size of journal that you probably want to do it in. It's a little bit big. You can see from looking at these why when I started teaching online and people like Claudia didn't even know that I did watercolor because I was not doing any watercolor and it was my way to put it Cory after life got interesting. I love that. I've always done art. I was one of these kids growing up that either couldn't sit still or would sit still in front of the TV and not want to do anything else. I was I don't know when I was growing up my mom thought there might be an issue a learning disability or something and the teachers basically told her I screwed up, you know, it was the 60s so I don't think they knew what to do with me. She found out because my two aunts were both art students that actually drawing an art helped me concentrate and focus. This is me, my face. I don't know if you can tell. There are a few pages in the back here that are not life book because I had pages left over in the journal so I wanted to fill them up. Thank you. This is old artwork. Here's the one of my husband that he doesn't like because he says I made him look like Santa Claus. So I like for a starter journal nothing too small because the smaller you go the harder it is to work in when you're going to try to do something like a face. Bigger is easier I think. I wouldn't do this big but like 8x10 the large delusions journal the size of that is good. This is huge but yes this is my husband but he says he looks like Santa Claus. He kind of does a little bit but I love the picture for the artwork. So you inspired this Lisa. I was watching your video and watching your huge journals and I thought you know I should re-share all those giant journals of mine. Hi Ashley and yes Mama Cats we all hope that you get better soon. Here's another where I was practicing this sort of color blocking technique it's not geometric it's you know very organic but it's just blocks of certain color in a certain place to help create the image and I when I would try these things I would just use my own face because that was just easy and this one I never took the tape off of it there's painter's tape all around the edge you won't see too much Christmas stuff in my journal I used to be in retail for years or customer service and I've literally decorated thousands of Christmas trees totally not my favorite thing you won't see a lot of Christmas another face this is ink sumi ink ink more drawing practice this is with more with the girl scouts we were drawing faces and different different you know different simple things how to working on shading and all that kind of stuff some of those girls were very talented here's another one you can tell I did this one probably at the same time as the other one just doing different colors I still think one of these would make a great Christmas card I like the other one a little bit better I think this is where I was just trying to fill the journal up more eyeball practice I love all the messy parts of me why do I have this feeling I didn't know what else to do with that page well throat infections and lung infections are nothing to screw around with mama cats we need to breathe so you better take care of yourself see this is similar to the one in the other book I did like a similar layout but different colors I was just trying to fill up pages at the end of the year I do like these though there's something about these that I really enjoy more figure studies and I think when I did these I would have both books out like side by side and I would do one here one here one here one here you know all in a row I had them all in a row I was out in the garage at that time this is another one where you could just take pieces of this page this background and photograph that or scan that it would make interesting collage paper so maybe this week you want to not only think about joining us in our free journaling program we're going to have over in the Facebook groups again the links for all four Facebook groups that are going to be doing it are in the description below each group is going to have the same main prompt and like a short share video for me each group is also going to have either its own sub prompt or a video tutorial or something of their own that's only in that group so so there you go some of my old journals so Lisa you are not the only one who started out the journey doing big journals and not by the least little stretch and this is just a small fraction of what I've got in the other room there are other journal flips here on my channel and if you would like to you can just search my channel for those other videos there is also one where I just do a flip of faces and it's called the good the bad and the ugly so if you it shows like a progression of my drawing skills the only way to get better is to practice and I love these books because you can do a lot of practicing on the pieces of paper in the journal and then put it on the bookshelf for later you don't have something I learned a little late after the fact when I got back into fine art as an adult is that not everything has to be on canvas and if you do it all on canvas then you're going to run out of room in your house so these journals are great just when the pages are dry if you have charcoal or pastel on them spray them with a fixative if you have anything else on them it doesn't even matter what is on there then use some kind of wax daddy vans is the one most of us use I like to use a beeswax natural beeswax for one thing because there's nothing toxicant but use the beeswax on the pages so it prevents some of the creak the sticking together you can of course put wax paper between the pages you know I'm probably going to pass away that wax paper is still going to be there my daughter is going to go what the hell mom she's not going to know why it's in there that might be funny I should stick a posted note in there alright that's it I didn't intend to be on that long I don't know we've probably been on a while but I just wanted to give you all some inspiration and you know you can work big working big is a lot of fun but you don't have to work this big and you know don't be ashamed of the work that you do in the beginning we all have to start somewhere me even me alright that's it for today don't forget to think about joining the Facebook groups and the most important thing do something nice for yourself like maybe work in your journals except for Wanda because she needs to go to bed and yeah do that because you deserve it alright I'll talk to you guys later bye guys