 Welcome to my creative year for 2018. I am so glad you decided to join us. If you didn't decide to join us yet and you want to, the link for the Facebook group is in the description below, so check it out. We hope to see you there. That being said, the topic for this month of January is budget. Each week we will be having a different prompt for the week within the topic to share with you. This week, our prompt is coming up next along with the how-to video of what I did. So I hope you enjoy the prompt, the topics, the process. If you have any questions, let me know. Leave a comment in here on YouTube or tag me over in a post on Facebook. That's it for right now. Let's get started. Hey guys! Alright, this week in my creative year, the prompt is use it or lose it. There's a lot of different ways you could take that. I'm going to take it in probably the obvious way. So if you've been following me for any length of time, you know I have been purging, remodeling, lightening my load in my physical environment, not only in my art room but the rest of my house as well. I readily admit that the first time you decide to get rid of things is difficult, especially when you've lived in a place as long as I've lived here, which is well over, let's see, our daughter is 23. We bought the house a year before she was born, so it's well over 20 years. I take that back. We bought it two years before she was born, so 24 years. We've been married 25. Something like that. Anyway, you get the point. It's been so long I've lost count. Anyway, the first time you get rid of stuff you decide to purge, whether it's in your art room, it's in your closet, it's in the kitchen, it doesn't matter. The first time is really difficult. And like the Konmari method, if you have read that book, we've reviewed both of her books in our teaching group last year, my year 2017. I reviewed both of her books and I love them. And while this isn't strictly her method, this is my method, why I was inspired by her books. And the first time you go through it and you pick the things that you love to keep and the things that you don't to get rid of, I find when I do this that there's always a category of things that I'm not sure about, so I keep. Or things that I think maybe I love and I think about it later and I'm like, why did I keep that? Especially when we're talking about art supplies, I don't want to keep things just because I feel like I spent a lot of money on them. That for me, that's not a good enough reason. Where art supplies are concerned, you all know we can always resell them and get our money, at least part of our investment back. You can donate them to a worthy cause and take their right off. You can always of course gift them. And I would rather do that than have them collect dust in my art room and become dried up and useless. I'd rather somebody else got enjoyment out of them. At this point I've gone through a lot of supplies in my room and I am now at that point where I'm taking a second look at things. So we're gonna set my notebook aside that's for January and we're gonna talk about one of those categories of things which is oil pastels. Now I like a good oil pastel for certain things to add highlights and marks to certain things. I don't use them all the time. I like to color them. They always need to be the last layer because they are an oil-based product. You aren't gonna be able to paint, write, or anything else on top of them. It's not gonna stick. Fat over lean, not lean over fat. So oil over watercolor or acrylic, but not watercolor or acrylic over oil. It won't stick. It will peel. It'll just make your life miserable. A little tidbit. So I like oil pastels. I don't love them. I don't want to completely get rid of them, but I do. I really need this entire box and this box. This is a lot of oil pastels. So what I'm going to do is sort through them. I have a bag here. I'm going to get rid of some and I think I know what I'm gonna do with this collection. While I'm doing it, I'm gonna talk to you all about a couple of different practices that I think I'm gonna recommend that you do. If you have a product like this that you're either not sure about or that you kind of think you want to keep some of, but you're not sure you want to keep all of, and whether you want to make your space lighter and brighter or you just feel like you're just tired of all the stuff. For me, it's kind of an anxiety thing. It really just ramps up my anxiety when my space is cluttered. If I have a product that I'm not sure of and I'm gonna get rid of some of these, I don't need a million pastels all in the same colors. I just don't. So we're gonna go through and I see one brand here that I was gifted that they work fine. There's nothing wrong with them. I just don't need them and we're gonna pull them out. If you have a product that you're not sure about that you think you might want to purge, but you're really, really not sure, then I want you to take that product no matter what it is. I want you to actively use it in your journals for at least a week. I want you to make a point of using it in your journals for at least a week. Play with it, try it, experiment with it. During that process you're gonna either rediscover your love for it or you're gonna say to yourself, what the heck was I thinking? So I want you to do that and I want you to play with it for at least a week every day. Once you're done with that week then you can sit and think and decide. I love it. I'm gonna keep it. I'm not so sure. I think I'm gonna get rid of it. Or maybe you need to keep playing. Whatever the decision I want you to stick to it. One of the things I'm gonna do here is I would love to, I want to keep the Shiva oil sticks. These are really like, they're a true oil paint stick. The rest of these are water soluble, more of a craft paint stick. I want to see if I can combine colors into some of these bins so that I can get these in here. So I want to try to do that in a way that's gonna make sense. And it might mean that I need to get rid of more crayons. Oh those are black. I'll just want to put the black. And with the blue. So I want you to play with a product for a week. I want you to really take a good hard look at it and see what you think about keeping it or not. These are big, these Shiva oil sticks, which is the reason why they're not in this box. But I do have limited space in my art room so I really would like to be able to combine these into one box that says oil pastels and that way I can just pull the one box and that would really be good for me. So let's see what we can do about doing that. These particular things I don't really need to play with because I already know how they work. Let's put this back in here. I already know I like them. I just have too many of them. And it may be I need to get rid of more than I think I do. We'll see. Maybe not. White and gray and then violet. So when you're doing this I want you to be really careful about not purging too much. It's really easy and tempting to just get rid of randomly get rid of a bunch of stuff. This is a really great example. I might be keeping too many oil pastels for as many times as I use them which isn't often. I really am the kind of artist that really likes to have a product and when I have it have a lot of colors of it until I'm really sick of it and sure I don't want to use it anymore. I may go through and purge in here one more time that really kind of wouldn't surprise me. I don't think so. But don't rush to get rid of a bunch of stuff that you think you might want to hang on to. If you're not sure keep it. Don't get rid of it. Okay. So that's my oil pastels. If that'll close. Yep. That works for me. So I want you this week to either use it, play with it, decide you love it, or lose it. Pass it on to somebody else and list it for sale on you know one of the many places on the internet that you can do that. Lighten up your space to allow for more creativity. I think that's really important. I am going to next. Are you all ready to be shocked? Go through these. Wait. It's not the only one. What are all these? Fluid acrylic paints. I think I have too many. So these are going to be the next purge. This is one of the more difficult things. I do think there are some bottles in here that are almost empty like that one. I don't you know for the amount of times I use these I really don't need these. There's just there's too many of them. So they're gonna have to be thinned. It's not easy but it's definitely worth it. I definitely advise it. So think about it. Use it or lose it. That's this week's prompt. Take it to heart. Play with your products that you've left locked in the closet in the bin in the dust for a long time. Pull them out. Play with them. See if you like them or not. If you don't maybe it's time for them to find a good home. That's it for today everybody. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys!