 We're here for another video for my creative year. We are here within my muse video. My muse is all over the place. If you've been following my vlog, you already know this. She's just dancing around, having a good old time, and having trouble focusing on the task at hand basically. The one thing she's adamant about right now is that I continue my daily practice of drawing and doodling and painting occasionally. Mostly she is loving the drawing and doodling right now. Yes, I know I'm talking about myself in the third person. Yeah, I know. Anyway, one of the things we're loving doing continually is drawing on black paper. Now, this has been a journey for me, so semi-fustrating journey. So this is a makeup case I picked up actually not long ago. I think I talked about it in a vlog at Fred Meyer, which is a store here locally in Oregon. They have them other places. They're part of Kroger. Anyway, this was in the beauty department. It says Mascara Maniac on the front and it's by Modella. And this is my black journal drawing bag. It's not in with the rest of my daily drawing stuff because drawing on black paper requires special tools and also I don't necessarily use them on other things. So that being said, when I want to draw my black journal, whether it's upstairs or down, I can just grab this bag and take it with me. Let's open it this way. So right here in the front, there is a zipper pocket which I actually don't have anything in, but you could put inspiration photos in there or if you have a journal that's a little bit smaller, you could put it in there. My journals are a little bit big, but that being said, these are homemade journals. They fit right in here. Perfect. So these are made with a file folder type cardstock for the cover and then drawing paper pages. I have a blank one in here and I always have a couple of, here's your first tip, I always have a couple of just plain pieces of black cardstock to try pens on. When I'm working with a pen or wanting to work with a pen that I don't know how it's going to show up on black paper. We're going to go over that in just a minute. I also have another one in here. There we go. That's where you can see I've been trying pens. And at some point, if it's interesting enough, that'll become a piece of collage paper on another project. So then I have everything in here that I need to create these interesting drawings, some of which have shown up on my business cards. That one might show up on something soon because I really like that one. So then it has two zipper pockets and it has this pouch in the back, which is probably for makeup brushes, but I have my basic pens here. So although this is a black journal, I do have some black pens in here and some white gel pens and white paint pens. These are the basics. Why the black? For fixing mistakes. So I have a black Sharpie, a black gel pen, and a black paint pen. And those are for all for helping me pick fixed mistakes. Then I have the basic doodling tool for working in a black journal, which is white. So I have a white gel pen, a Uniball Signo, and a jelly roll pen. Honestly, they're the two best gel pens on the planet. The jelly roll comes in more colors than the Uniball Signo, but they are the two best gel pens on the planet, as far as mark making on any paper, but especially black paper. There are cheaper versions out there, but I would always choose quality over quantity, to be honest. I have a white paint pen. This is a Sharpie paint pen. It's cheap and expensive. It does the job. I'm not a super big fan of paint pens in general. I usually only have black and white to begin with. I have a few of the big, I think they're Liquitex paint pens. I'm going to be using them up and then I'm not buying them again. They're just, they're not my favorite. And if I'm going to make marks with paint, I'm going to do it with a paint brush. I also have a Molotow marker, which is also a paint pen. Now if I was going to have a lot of paint pens, it would probably be this brand. The paint in their pens is super opaque, nice and thick. They don't generally clog up. That being said, I have let some of my pens of all brands sit for too long and then the nibs get dried up. But the nice thing about the Molotow markers is it's easy to get new nibs for them. So you can take the cap off, pull the little nib out, and then put a new one in. They're also refillable. So when they're empty, you don't have to throw it away, unlike the Sharpies, which are not refillable. In this front pocket, I have various metallic markers I've discovered work great on black paper, or at least well enough to make me happy. And I'm going to show you what I mean. Where's my unmarked black paper? Okay, so first we'll start with the Sharpies. So Sharpies in general, the regular Sharpies, they're not going to show up on black paper. They're just not opaque enough. And I'm going to get a color Sharpie so I can show you what I mean. Okay, and we're going to do a couple tests so I can show you what I mean. So this is Sharpie. This is a neon blue Sharpie. It's nice and wet and juicy. This is how it looks on white paper. Really pretty color, right? But this is how it looks on black paper. Yeah, yeah. This is a permapake marker. And this is technically, I guess, this is an opaque pigment marker. I love these markers. Actually, I replaced some paint pens with these. I love these. These are my some favorites of mine. This particular one comes with a chisel tip on one end and a bullet tip on the other end. I usually use the chisel tip. But it's a really pretty blue color on the white paper, as you can see. It shows up on the black paper, sort of. But it's much better than the Sharpie. This is the metallic one. They're much better than the Sharpie pens. The only reason they're not in the case is because I use these mostly upstairs and not in the black journal. But when I am upstairs with the black journal, I do sometimes use these. That being said, I also have these markers. These are from the Japanese dollar store Daiso. If I can link some of these for you in the description below in my Amazon shop, I will be doing that. They come in sets of three for $1.50. And I bought them before the Perma-Pake markers. So you can see that's almost the same color as the Perma-Pake metallic. And it looks very similar on the black paper. Because I have these, I need to use them up. These, unlike the other Sharpies, these are Sharpie metallics, which they only make gold, bronze, and silver, as far as I'm aware. And unlike your other Sharpie up there, look at that. Look at that. So I love those. So those live in my black journal bag. And then you have these gel pens. So I really have two brands. So I have Jelly Roll Moonlight. Is it Moonlight? I think it's Moonlight. I'll link it in the description. Gel pens. And all the Jelly Rolls show up best on black paper. And then these are Uniball Signo gel pens. They do come in colors. They don't come in nearly as many colors as the Jelly Rolls, but they do come in colors. I have found on the Uniball Signos that the metallics show best other than the white on black paper. So I have mostly the metallics in the bag up here. The only other one that's in the bag is a white one. And we'll take a green one here. So this is the green Uniball Signo metallic pen on white paper. Let's zoom in just a little bit. There we go. And this is what it looks like in black. And all of these metallic colors look equally beautiful on black paper. And then this is a similar color in the Jelly Roll. So this is a Jelly Roll Moonlight pen. This is not metallic, but it is a similar color. And it just looks wonderfully opaque on black paper without having to put white underneath it. So that's the other thing you can do is put a white design and then you have to color over it. I am lazy and I don't want to do that. If you know of other pens that look beautiful on black paper, I would love to hear about them. I will be linking the pens that I recommend. Like I said, I'll be linking them in my Amazon store and I will be linking the ones I can find at least. The ones that might be challenging are these ones from Daiso. And I might have to just give you a Daiso online store link. I know a lot of you are like, I don't have one of those close to me. Japanese dollar stores, they have an online store. You can order from there. It's a little more expensive, but if you have metallic markers and you have gel pens, test them on black paper. If you want a doodle on black paper, test them out. I was surprised by the ones that did and didn't work. So that's one of the things I'm completely like, enamored and fascinated with this month. I hope it gives you some ideas of what you can do doodling and doodling on black paper. It's a wonderful thing. I'm going to put all these away and we're going to be back with one other thing really quick in just a minute. Okay, there's one more thing I wanted to share with you all and let's zoom out just a little bit. So I know this month's My Muse video is going to be a little long, but oh wait, shaky camera. It's going to be a little long, but sorry about that. Okay, so daily drawing. So you all know if you've been following me on social media, I try to draw and doodle every day. My drawings are always prompted by lists of inspiration words. I've been getting them over the years from a few different places. Of course, we have those kind of creative words over in my creative year and you're welcome to join. The link is in the description below if you're not already a member. Also, this one is from Sketchbook School. Yes, that says August 2018 because I'm behind. So I'm doing four of these little sketchbooks a month right now until I catch up. If you don't know, I moved last year and the whole house hunting and moving process completely derailed my daily art practice. I didn't start doing it again until, I don't know, November maybe? I don't know. It was, yeah, so anyway. So I'm completely behind, but that being said, I have different size of these little notebooks. This one is, again, this is one of those homemade ones. I do have these in my Etsy shop. I occasionally do have them for sale. I'll make a big lot of them. I'll save a few out for myself and put the rest in Etsy. They come in either all black, this one and all black, black cover, black pages. The others have craft card covers generally printed with my artwork on them and then they're filled with either white, tan or gray drawing paper. Paper, I prefer nice, thick, 60 pound or heavier drawing paper so that I can, if I want to put a little water on it, the paper holds up because I do a little bit of scrubbing. I'm going to show you exactly what I do. We're going to have a little daily drawing tutorial here in my muse bonus. So anyway, so I have different sizes. I also have some store-bought journals and that I'm trying to use up. These are from Scoutbooks. I think are the people who make the books for this sketchbook project. If you don't know what that is, again, I'll leave it in the description below. And then this one is one I picked up when I was doing, when I was speaking at the NPR event in San Francisco last year and we got a bag of goodies including this little journal. And I've been filling this one up this month for February for my creative year. And in my creative year, at the end of the month, I take the words and I actually have to. I'm not done with the month yet so I'm going to have to go back to the beginning and go to the back side. So that's another thing that I do. It's going to confuse somebody someday. Anyway, at the end of the year, I try to make a list of the words that people can download and print and put in the front of their sketchbooks if they so choose. I also have all of last year for my creative year that's already been done this way that's printable for the folks over in that Facebook group. If you got behind on your words like I did, you can print them out and I'm doing them simultaneously. So I'm doing February this year, February last year. How I do them is I have this bag. It lives downstairs. I've, it's too big for camera. I've shown it recently. People are like, Oh my God, where did you get that bag? I made it. It's not my pattern. It's called a sew together bag. Now the original sew together bag is very small. It's probably half the size and not nearly as tall. I hacked it to make it larger to fit my drawing tools. This is version two. Version one was not quite tall enough to close very well for the things I needed to store in here. So I made a new one. And yes, I know the jingle bells annoy some people. Sorry. I like them. So this is the new one and it's perfect. In it, when you open it and it's kind of, I don't know why, but when it's closed, it kind of like reminds me of a football. I just tuck it into my arm and I can take it up and downstairs. I don't know. It's the one thing during the move. I could get my hands on and I knew, I knew where it was all the time. So in the back, I've put two elastic loops with buttons so that it stays up like this and forms a pocket back here. Otherwise it would be flat like this in the front. And back here, I have a journal where I'm working on some concept designs for a project for a business right now. This is my daily pages book. Where I just write three pages of however I'm feeling. And then my sketchbooks also fit back here. In this pocket, I have a few extra sketchbooks, generally because I don't have a lot in here. Generally, I have a few though because especially like right now because it's the end of the month and I'm almost done with some of these and I don't want to have to run up and down the stairs to get the sketchbooks. There's also one that I've been working on since beginning of last year that's unprompted. So when I just feel like drawing something, for instance, okay, here we go. So when I was at the photo shoot for Yahoo Small Business, they asked me at part of the shoot, can we catch you drawing something? And so I said, sure. I was the subject of the photo shoot. So, you know, that was why I was there. So I opened the sketchbook and I just, this was the lamp that was on the table in the studio where we were filming. And this is my jar of paint tools. There we go. So I was drawing in here. I haven't really done anything in here since then, but I do like to have the pages like be inky, splattery in the background. So one thing I did do not long ago was I went ahead and did that to the rest of the pages so that I could do more like drawings like that. And then I also have a little zipper pocket with cut all the little cutout prompts that I need to do, that I need to catch up on. So these are all of them. So at the end of the month when I finish up the journals that are up here, I'll randomly reach in here, grab a couple, glue them into the front of the new journals. And those are the ones I use for the month. And when new ones, I'm probably never going to empty this because when the new ones come out, I don't remember if it was draw right at daily or sketchbook school. I think it was draw right at daily that's not doing them anymore. But one of the two of those is still doing the daily prompt list. And so I've been printing theirs out. Plus, of course, we have them for my creative year. And then also I have all of my creative year in here from last year. Well, I have all of them. So I have lots to catch up on. In front of each of the zipper pockets, I have pen loops with elastic. So back here are marker and colored pens. And I also have one multi pen because these markers, these are again from the Japanese dollar store. There's no yellow though. You notice that? There's no yellow. It's very weird. But I have this multi pen that has yellow in it. And this is just a ballpoint colored ballpoint pen with, you know, multi your standard multicolor pen. These I think are just these are from Muji. These I think are just all colored ballpoints. But they're Muji, which is another Japanese store. It's not the Japanese dollar store, but it's another store. If I can find the link for these, I'll link them below. In this third pocket, I have a bunch of rulers and mark making guides, little small ones. Every now and then I acquire a few too many tools or something in the bag. And then of course I have to clean it out that standard. I also have this tin, which is my graphite drawing kit, my smaller one. I do have two of them and have a few blending tools, some different kinds of graphite pencils, different hardnesses and a rule. That's not a ruler. An eraser, a sharpener, and I have the one blending stuff, but then I have these two eyeshadow things are great for blending. So when I want to do a drawing that's just pencil, I have this downstairs. I don't have to come upstairs for the other one. And that all lives right there. I'm using the pencils right now, mostly in the concept drawing journal on FYI. We'll go into this pocket in a minute. On the front of, again, on the front of each pocket, we've got pen loops. And on this one, I've got all my favorite black pens that I use. My two favorites right here, big crystal, plain old, big crystal. I don't do lots of drawing first in pencil, and then erasing. I just go straight in with the big pen. That being said, when I'm doing some things like the concept drawings, I will go first in pencil. I did discover recently that one of the things I needed to add here was a white pencil because I was doing some sketching on a black background in the concept journal for the business. That being said, these may come out of here when I'm done with that. These don't necessarily need to live in here because I've got that other pencil box in here. For right now, I need these in here. One of my other favorite black drawing pens is this graphic liner from Oto, OHTO, and I prefer the number 10. It's a nice gel pen drawing pen. I love it. And then I also like the Pilot Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen. There is a ink precision pen. This one, an R2 pen. This one might be from Dollar Tree actually. There is a black and a brown uniball signal and also a permaball, pilot permaball pen. My favorites are the big crystal. I have two white jelly roll pens because inevitably one is done or almost done. And this one is, well, they're both pretty close to done, so I'm going to have to get a new one up here soon, in here soon. And then I have two water brushes. My favorite is the Pentel Water Brush in Medium. This pocket here is where I keep all the other miscellany. So my reading glasses because, you know, I'm not young anymore. A rag, need that. A glue stick for gluing those prompt lists in the front of the journals. My fancy Dancy. I love it. Pilot Vanishing Point Fountain Pen, which is one of my favorite pens, and I will occasionally do writing or drawing with this pen. Some ink for that pen. And also, this is the Pentel Brush Pen, which I also love, but I'm worried about it leaking, so I keep it in this little Ziploc bag with the extra ink for the Vanishing Point. And those live in there. Zips up nicely. Now, for the most part, the color on my drawings comes from these, and these are Bible Gel High Gliders, Highlighter Pens. A couple of different brands. One is Bible High Glider, and the other one is, I think, Recollections? Maybe not. This one just says Bible Journaling. Somebody gave me these, and I love these. And if you put a water brush to them before they dry, they do move around, and you can spread the pigment out a little bit and make them less sticky. So when you first put them on, they're a bit sticky. But if you take a water brush to them, they're less sticky, and also you can go over them a little bit with white gel pen, which, by the way, before it dries, you can also move it around with a water brush. The other one in here is this black. This is Target Up and Up. It's a watercolor crayon. It's from the Kids Twistable Watercolor Crayon. It's from the Kids Art Department. It comes with a bunch of colors. My favorite's the black, so I keep the black in here. And then the front of this bag has like a dashboard or landing pad. And what happens here is my phone usually goes here. My watercolor kit or the journals that I'm... There's Linton here. Oh, the journals that I'm getting ready to work on are here until I'm done with them, and then they go in the back. When I am looking for inspiration for the words and what to draw, this is the important part that you're all... I think some people don't understand. So what's today's word in this one? Yesterday's word was wet, garden. So I will go to Google Images or Pinterest. I will type in garden drawing, and I will find something that I think is interesting, and I'll take inspiration for that from my drawing in my journal. Now it's not about copying the other artist's work or stealing their design. This is about just daily art practice and taking inspiration from their work without having to go around, in my case, walk around outside in a little bit of snow that we do have. It's a little cold outside. And trying to find inspiration for something. Now see, I would go to this one, and I would pick one of these, and I would do a drawing inspired by one of these illustrations, because those are really pretty. So think about what you can do to incorporate some daily art practice into your life, into your work. I really think it's beneficial for your creative journey. Whether you're doing daily inspired drawings or you're just doing doodles on black paper or white paper for that matter, could be newspaper. It doesn't matter. Do something and share with us what you're doing over in the group. We would love to see your posts inspired by the prompts, inspired by the videos over in the group. Now I will caution you, over in my creative year, your posts have to be group related. You can't just post randomly. They need to be related to something in the group or a conversation that we're having. That being said, I would love to see a conversation on daily practice startup over in the group. That's it for now. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. If you would like to be a part of the Facebook group, you can join it using the link in the description below. I'll link what supplies and materials I can find in my Amazon shop. I will also put a link for the Sew Together bag and the hack for the pattern alterations. If you know somebody who knows how to sew and they can make you a bag and you want a bag, I'll give you the hack instructions and the pattern adjustment instructions and then they can make you one. Maybe you know how to sew and you can make yourself one. If you have questions about the bag in particular, you can private message me outside of my creative year and outside of the YouTube comments. You can DM me or you can Facebook message me and I'll answer your questions. That's it for right now. Don't forget to go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.