 this episode of The Messy Journaler, I want you to just focus on making some DIY papers to use in our next journal page. Of course, there's a million videos out there on the YouTubes on how to do this, including a bunch of videos on using, of course, a jelly plate or some other kind of monoprinting technique, which of course you can do. And I have gel plates, but maybe you don't have one. Maybe you don't want to be bothered getting it out. Maybe you, if your studio is not exactly, your art space isn't exactly organized like mine is not, sometimes you can't figure out where you put it away because it's a very safe place. And sometimes you just don't feel like working with a jelly plate. There's lots of ways to make your own collage paper and your own DIY collage bits. There's a million ways to do that. They usually start with some kind of paper. It's just a piece of paper like this, which was honestly waste paper from another project. And I think this is spray, no, this is not spray ink, this is ink pad stuff where I was inking some edges of things. This was my scrap paper. And when I was done with the other project, I looked at this and went, huh, that's interesting. I think I need to keep that. But also you can do something like you saw me doing. Now this particular piece of paper is from blotting some of the excess paint and ink off of some of these other papers. It's also interesting. So I'm going to keep it to use in a collage. I don't know if it'll go in this journal page, but I'm going to keep it to use in something. Yesterday I was finishing up an art foamy's video. And as I often do with art foamy's when I am printing with them, I won't immediately wipe off whatever excess paint or ink after doing the one print. I will get some scrap paper, which is always on my desk. And I will stamp it off onto more paper. And so these were done yesterday from doing that. And I had so, I liked it so much, I just kept stamping. So these will go into my stash of DIY collage papers. And then I did these. Now it's really easy to find white or black. I like thin paper when I'm going to make DIY collage paper. These are pages out of my moleskin journals. When I finish the moleskin for the month, there's always extra pages in the back. I always take them out. I save the pages for doing this sort of thing. Otherwise I use plain white printer paper, something thin. I don't like to use any paper that's super thick and bulky. You can of course use cardstock. It's easier to find colors of cardstock, but I prefer thin paper. Now if you're like me and you've done a fair amount of computer printing in your past, you probably have a ream of astro-brights in the different rainbow colors laying around your art room. Or just, you know, a ream of, I don't know, blue or pink printer paper from that Christmas newsletter or something that you only needed to make ten copies of. Meanwhile you've got a whole stack of that paper in your art room or in your office. Get that out and use that for making some collage papers. All the colored paper here is from an astro-brights ream of paper that comes with all these different sort of rainbow colors. These are ones I just splattered on them. That's all I did. That's more moleskin paper. It also had black and white paper. And I really wanted the black paper because I was really itching to do some collage papers that were black with white ink of which I didn't have any. I'd used it all up and so I wanted to do some more. And this is just watery marks. This is marks from my fan brush. More dots. And you can see where the, this was white, fluid acrylic. And you can see where the color in the paper isn't color, water fast and some of it leached up into the white paint and turned it a little bit pink. This is just squiggly lines of the skinny brush and black ink. More marks from my fan brush. I really like these. I like the way they turned out. I did one white paper and then one moleskin paper. More squiggly lines. More splattered dots. You get the idea. I want to get here down to the bottom ones. More, some circles with my thin brush. I did a number of those in different colors. Some dotted lines with my thin brush. Some crosses with my thin brush. This is a sharpie, fine tipped sharpie pen. More circles. And this is just squiggles, just squiggles. And then this. So this is literally inspired by a tissue box. I think the tissue box is downstairs. Wish I would probably when it's empty of tissues, I probably will save the box and tear it up and bring it up here, but I liked the pattern on the tissue box, which looks like this so much. I thought that needs to be a collage paper, which inspired this whole thing and the next journal page. So the other thing you can do, and this is just some coppery gold ink, the other thing you can do is if you make a stack of papers like this and you make one you just really love, that you've really fallen in love with, but you don't want to have to keep making it over and over again. If you have the capabilities of it, you can scan it and save yourself a decently resolution to copy of it to reprint over and over again, keeping in mind that if you are like most of us and have an inkjet printer, that ink in that print is not going to be waterproof. It's water soluble. So how you apply it to your work will be different. You want to use less water and probably something very dry like a glue stick. And I bring that up because everything I used to color these papers was something that will dry water resistant. Now as I showed you with this purple one, which I found out as it was drying, the paper itself may be not water resistant. So when I do glue it down, if I use some watery glue, it may the purple and the paper may run a little bit. That's okay. I don't have a problem with that necessarily, but I want to limit the amount of that as much as possible. So anyway, whether you're gel printing or you're using waste paper like this one, you're stamping off images from another project like these. I want you to spend some time and make some DIY collage paper. Don't spend a lot of money. Use what you have. You don't need to have anything special. I use paints that we're drying up anyway and make yourself a fun stack of collage papers. Make a bunch of different colors because we don't really know yet where we're going to go with this. These two obviously aren't completely dry yet. We don't know yet for sure where we're going to go with this, but we want to have some variety so we have some choices, right? So and someday I'll figure out how to organize my giant bucket of DIY papers because it's not like I don't have a lot, but anyway. Hey guys. So you just saw that we made some DIY painted papers. There is a lot of different ways how to do that on the internet, including jelly printing and a bunch of other stuff. There's a million inspiration videos on YouTube, but the short story is making your own painting papers and or trading with friends painting papers is a really great way to get some very interesting and unique paper items to collage with. I picked these two out of the stash that I currently did. I did end up reorganizing my DIY papers stash because it's kind of extensive and I just made it easier to get to. Anyway, that was, you know, hello bonus. I'll put a picture here of the drawers that I set up. I didn't spend any money to do it. I had all the items in stock anyway. I'm going to create a page now inspired by making these and we're going to do it here. We're going to do obviously the Messy Journaler. The first thing we need to do is we need to glue down where I've removed some pages from the journal to accommodate for all the different things I knew I was going to paste in here. So I'm going to just use my glue stick and a little scraper tool thing and glue these little spines down. I didn't take the whole piece of paper out the whole page because then if I do, then the stitching will fall apart and I didn't want that. So I just take out most of it and I leave about a quarter of an inch and then I just glue it down like that. All right. And this is an old Moleskine Weekly Journal, a weekly something. Next thing we're going to do is cut some shapes and glue them down. I have a couple of kinds of tinted gesso. This is a DIY tinted gesso and brown color. And this is actually a watercolor ground, which is basically gesso meant for watercolor paints. Yes, it's gold. It is a Daniel Smith product and I've had it kind of for a while and I should really use it up before it dries up into a solid block, so we're going to use it. We'll see where we go. I'll speed forward through my process and I'll be back. In another episode of The Messy Journal or have fun, make a mess, do some playing, create some fabulous artwork. I'll see you in the next video. Bye, guys.