 Start agent specialists. Your mission for June should you choose to accept it is as follows. 1. Cover your background with words, writing, or text. 2. Add a wash of color across the background. 3. Collage tissue paper on your page. 4. Add sketchy marks. 5. Mix something from nature into gel, medium, or glue and add it to your page. 6. Add fabric, ribbon, lace, or trim. 7. Add brads, staples, or clips. 8. Add a word, phrase, or quote. Your suggested color scheme for June is ocean, lemon, and lime. Your words for inspiration are sun, dance, breathe, document, and joy. Remember this message will self-destruct in three seconds. Good luck. Hi everybody! Welcome to another Mission Inspiration for June. So the first prompt is to cover your page with words, writing, or text, the whole background. And I'm using a combination of handwriting and free writing and also some little bits of paper, just random notes and things from my grandmother's address book and grocery lists and stuff like that, from her stash of things that I inherited when she passed. So we're going to use some of those little bits of paper on our journal page background and collage those down with some matte medium and give it a good dry before we go forward. I have on the desk in front of me my journal and the bits of paper, pens, pencils, paints all around me and the prompts off to the side. I am working in a moleskin weekly notebook. This is from 2017, it's an old one. And I'm loving the challenge of working on the thinner paper and working in the moleskin notebook. It's a lot of fun for me. Anyway, so I'm just randomly putting the paper down and just making sure it's well stuck down and that I've got the matte medium everywhere and then we will break out the heat gun here in just a minute and give it a quick dry. I am grabbing some paints now. I have some different colors of Dina weekly media paint. Our next prompt is add a wash of color across your page. So I decide to really make sure that matte medium is dry. You can tell by how shiny it is, it's a little bit on the wet side. It doesn't matter for me if it's a little bit wet, but I don't want it drippy wet and this paper won't hold up to that for one. You can see as the shine goes away there in the picture that that means it's dry. I'm going to get out some little bits of the Dina weekly paints and some favorite colors for me and colors that are inspired by our prompts and inspiration words this month. The colors are ocean, lemon and lime. So I'm going to use that as inspiration for the colors to add a wash to my page with. And we are going to water them down. I also have a buff color of paint, so I don't want things to get too bright. I want them to be muted. I'm adding some water to the paint and I'm using a fan brush to just messily smear paint on the page and I may decide to get a bit drippy with it. I don't know. We'll find out. I don't remember now what I did, to be honest. So we are adding these colors just in a random fashion to the page. It sort of pushes the writing into the background because I'm adding water to the acrylic paint. It is fairly translucent, but it does push it to the background and bring the color to the foreground. I am getting rid of some of the brush marks with a baby wipe, just blotting it. Literally blotting it. I'm not rubbing it or anything. I'm just blotting it. All right. So next we are going to give that a good dry and then we are going to collage tissue paper onto our page. So I have random pieces of tissue paper, pattern tissue, gift tissue, and by pattern tissue I mean sewing pattern tissue, gift tissue and various things for my stash to add more interest and texture to the background yet keep it translucent and light. I want to still be able to see all the layers through whatever I put on top, at least for the moment. This is actually one of my downloads from my Etsy shop that's printed on some vintage typing paper with my inkjet printer. Holy cow, is that a lot of fun to do. Now it is vintage typing paper. It is an inkjet printer and while the ink stuck on there really good and it printed just like a charm, you don't want to get the front of it too wet. It is inkjet, an inkjet print. So that means the ink is not like a laser jet, the ink is not permanent so it will run a little bit and you can see in parts when I put it on there and I scraped it in or pushed it in with the gift card that the ink did bleed just a little bit. I'm okay with that but I wanted to not do that too much because I didn't want it to bleed too much. But it worked great by the way. So if you have some old vintage typing paper laying around, see if you can print on it with your printer and create some interesting collage pieces with it. Okay, so now our next prompt is to add sketchy marks. So I was recently in Lake Tahoe, California and I was on vacation with my husband. We did a lot of walking around and driving around as we always do when we're up there and one of the things we went to go see was the lake and we went down to where they docked the MS Dixie which is a ship that cruises the lake and there's a picture of it which I will include the link where you can get a download copy of it if you want to use it for inspiration. And we're going to do a sketch of the MS Dixie on our page and use it for inspiration. I'm going to just use a ballpoint pen and I am going to get it on there. Now the first thing I'm going to do is do a light wash of some white gesso so that our sketch really stands out from the page really well. I am going to blot it with a baby wipe so that again we don't have brush marks, it's a little bit blended. You can still see the background writing and colors through the gesso but the drawing will stand out more. Now before you get in there with any of your pens, whether you're using a ballpoint pen or anything, give your gesso a good dry. It's really not a good idea to write over or draw over gesso when it's wet. You ruin a lot of pens that way, guess how I found that out? Just take my word for it. I've ruined a lot of pens because I don't learn. I'm using a plain old Bic crystal ballpoint pen, nothing fancy and I'm going to just roughly sketch out my ship. Now if you're not comfortable with sketching, you could collage it on, you could print out the picture of the MS Dixie and put carbon paper in between the picture and your journal page and then trace over the lines and then go over the lines with a pen. That's a great way to do it if you're not comfortable with your drawing. I like loose sketchy marks so I don't try to be perfect about it because I like the way loose sketchy drawings look but if you have a different idea of what you want to see, that's cool. But again, think about collaging it on or maybe printing it on some tissue paper or printing it on deli paper or printing it on hello typing paper, we talked about that already and collaging it on something that's transparent so you can see your layers. You could also, of course, like we said, use carbon paper. Here's my sketching process. Just loose, not exactly perfect but I'm really not shooting for it to be perfect and I do love the way it turned out though. It took me just a few minutes to do, it was a lot of fun. I love Lake Tahoe, California. If you haven't been there and you're going to be in the area, I do recommend you stop by and at least drive by. It's a beautiful part of California. One of my favorites. And a cruise on the MS Dixie, by the way, is really a lot of fun. I have been on it a number of times and yeah, never gets old. We didn't go on it this week that we were there because it was windy and a little stormy to be honest and the lake was a little choppy so my husband wasn't feeling good so I figured it was best not to push our luck. So I'm just using the big ballpoint pen. I haven't used anything else to do the sketch with. I do end up getting out a red gel pen and I believe a white paint pen to add color and highlights to the sketch. Again, I'm not looking to draw every single detail. I just want to give suggestions of the shapes. That's what makes me the happiest so that's what we're going to do. And I may not take the white paint pen out. I may just use the black and the red. I don't remember now. Let's watch the video and find out, shall we? I'm sketching in suggestions for all the little windows and doorways on the ship. Flagpole, the different shapes. And I always do like a loose sketch barely touching the pen to the paper and then when I have my basic shape drawn in a way that I like, then I go back like I'm doing right now and I push a little harder and I leave a few darker black marks in certain areas, not over the whole thing. And I sketch in some shading where it's needed and just give it some shadows. And this is the part that really makes the drawing sort of stand out. And then for this particular sketch, adding the red because the MS Dixie does have red trim on the ship. And adding the red sketchy marks where the trim was in the photo and it really adds a lot to the picture. I'm just kind of loosely sketching in some suggestions of a water. Oh, I do add the white paint pen. There you go. I thought I did. Most of the time when I do these kind of sketches, I'm doing them in a different notebook and I use a white gel pen, but a white, sharpie paint pen works just fine. It's my favorite paint pen. Then I'm getting a red gel pen, a paper mate inkjoy. Again, nothing fancy. You can find it at your local office supply store and I'm adding those red marks where the red trim is on the MS Dixie. I have pictures of the Dixie and other things from Lake Tahoe on my website. On the inspiration photos page, I'll include the link to my site in the description below. I decide to stop there that I'm good. So our next prompt is glue something from nature to your page. Now I have a drawer of nature. So I have a drawer of nature and I have a lot of things in the drawer. Sticks, shells, flowers, all kinds of stuff. And another prompt that is on the list is to add fabric ribbon, lace or trim and then number seven is brad staples or clips. So we're going to kind of do all of those at once. And I have different fabric and trims here from my stash. I have a little piece of canvas with different things collaged on top of it. I call it halfway art where I've taken these little bits and I've pre made sort of these little homemade embellishments with some of my rubber stamps and different bits in my studio. And we're taking a piece of halfway art and some of the trim from my stash. I'm using my Tim Holtz tiny attacher to attach the trim to the little piece of halfway art and then trimming the trim. I'm leaving the little edges hanging over because I like that. Taking another piece of trim and attaching it to the other side of the journal page and I'm going to just staple it. I'm not going to try to glue it or anything, I'm just going to staple it. And I have to do this before I want to add the nature. So I saw all three of these prompts coming up next and thought, you know, I really, I want to let's get these attached first before we do the nature thing. So now I'm going to figure out where I want the halfway art and get that attached down with the staples. Then I'm going to take these little dried twigs for my nature drawer and I'm going to break them up and mix them in my little bowl here with some gel medium and glue them down to the page that way. Now you really want to take this kind of thing and use gel medium with it, a heavy gel, excuse me, and really kind of encapsulate it with the gel into the page, especially if it's not dried out all the way, although these are really dry and brittle. You also want to use a heavy gel medium for something like this to get it attached to the page because of the texture of them. Nothing else is really going to stick them well to the page, not permanently. So I just really just make a texture paste out of the twigs and gel. And then I figure out where I want those to be on the page and just push them down with the palette knife. Now, the thought behind this is that Lake Tahoe, California is a beautiful place filled with woods and pine trees and bushes. There's also a certain texture to the environment, to the area, to the people. And the vintage lace and trims, the sticks and twigs all remind me of the area, the people and the things that I really enjoy about the area and visiting it. I wish I could afford a house there because I'd live there in a heartbeat. But anyway, that's a different conversation. So here you can just see me, some of the twigs are still a little long. So I'm just breaking them with the edge of the palette knife and then pushing them down. And then we need to let that dry really well before you don't mess with the area where the twigs are. I have these little round stickers that I think I got in Happy Mail. I'm going to stick some of them down to the page. They are in colors that I like for the page. They remind me of some of the flowers and things that bloom up in the area. And then we are going to go with number eight, which is add a word, phrase or quote. Any of you who have been following me here on YouTube and social media know most of my work involves a word, phrase or quote, almost always. So I had this little quote on my desk, get the stress out, which, you know, for me and my husband, or take the stress out, sorry, for me and my husband when we go to Lake Tahoe, it's a time for where we can relax and get away. Whether we go anywhere or we just stay at the condo, we can get our stress out by just spending time together. It's peaceful. It's quiet. There's no phone calls. There's no obligations, no nothing. So we love it up there. So for me, this quote fits perfectly. I take some of my leftover paint, watered down paint, and I use it to color up the tag because the tag was just a little bit too bright and manila-y for me for what I wanted on this art journal page. So I put some paint on there and then just kind of blotted it off. And that was much better. And I just kept working at it until it was right, but that was much better. I do decide that it's a little bit too blended for me. So yeah, that's why I've got those other colors out and I'm just using my finger. You just keep working at it and blotting it until you get it to where it looks good. I just didn't want it to have it look too pristine to go with the page because that wasn't what I was looking for. Make sure it's a dry. I love the Dean and Wakeley paint because it dries pretty quickly. Flatten the tag out, bring the journal page back and figure out where we want it. I got to get that quote on there. So then once I get the tag made, just do a dry run and figure out where you want it. I realize it's too bright. So I get out some white paint and a paint roller. I should say white and gray paint. I think the gray one I end up using is called elephant by Dean and Wakeley. The white is just a generic white that I have in my stash. It was what I could reach at the moment while the camera was on. And this is just a cheap dollar store paint roller. And I just use it to roll some paint on there, put some water on there too, just to mute the colors back a little bit and that's much better. Again, get that to where you like it, give it a dry. For some reason, this was the hardest part of the page for me. I don't know, I don't know, the little tag with the quote on it, the very last piece. Our inspiration words for the month are sun, dance, breathe, document and enjoy. For me, this page really expresses all of those. I love the way my elements dance around the page on here. And for me, Lake Tahoe is the place where we can just enjoy the sun and breathe and enjoy spending time together. And documenting that in my journal is, I'm all about that. I'm just all about that. Documenting my journey, documenting my experience is fabulous. I'll include a picture in the end of what the page ended up looking like dry, which is fabulous. I do ink up the edges there really quick of the tag with some ink. I don't know if y'all saw that. I barely saw it on here on the playback. Anyway, I stapled it in again, no glue. And I hope you all enjoy the process and you enjoy this year, this month's mission inspiration. I hope you have a great time with it. Don't forget to create something that you just enjoy creating. It's not about meeting anyone else's expectations except your own. And yes, you see me with a green gel pen adding some just scratchy marks to balance out the green in the tag with what's on the page. Anyway, enjoy the process, create some art, have some fun. Don't worry about anybody else. And above all, go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. And I'll see you later. Bye, guys.