Janette's Art Mood

I finished another handmade sketchbook, this time out of Arches Watercolor paper and some really cute paisley fabric. I got lucky and was able to purchase a couple of 22"x30" sheets on sale at a local art supply store. I decided to use this one as a Swatch Book for one of my 24 color Palettes .  I got the idea for the Zentangle Swatch Book from a  YouTube Video  from Notable Ink . I really liked the idea of having a handy mixing chart of your palette and practice your Zentangle doodles at the same time. If you don’t want to go through all the work of the Swatch Book and/or drawing the pages, I think you can buy the designs ready-made for download from her site. And yes, there were moments when I was considering just buying the pages myself, but I decided to stick with it and keep practicing. That’s why we doodle, right? To get better at it.  I started with Phthalo Blue (green shade) and ended up with some really nice greens. I especially like the Burnt Sienna combination; it

 I haven’t been able to do a lot of drawing and painting recently, mostly because I’ve been having problems with my vision. A couple of years ago, I had cataract surgery on my right eye and since then I was able to get around without my glasses which I’d worn for decades. The only thing I needed was cheap readers you can buy anywhere, so no prescriptions—yay!  However, my left eye has been giving me issues for the last couple of months and I’ve been inching closer and closer to the computer screen during work. So, off to the Doctors I went and, sure enough, I need to have cataract surgery on the left eye too, as well as some corrective lenses while they’re at it. So, after watching Sandy Allnock’s Finding the zone by doodling nonsense video , I decided to just do just that. I grabbed a stretch book I made just for doodling, my TWSBI Fountain Pen, a pencil and started making some random lines and circles on a page..   Then the hard part (for me anyway) begins. I never know how to start

Keeping in line with my new Blog name/motto and my latest Mood--I'm into Zentangle and Cartonnage at the moment, I decided to  thin out my collection of Stamps and Dies and do a Destash .  Obviously, I'm not getting rid of everything, I still have  A LOT of Stamps and Dies, many of which I won't part with (yes, there are a few My Monthly Hero Kits  from Hero Arts in that Camp 😊so don't even ask) I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to go about it yet, but I think the easiest will be what I've seen other crafters do is to perhaps create a separate Instagram account and link my PayPal to it.  I'm also considering using Notion , which is something I've been playing with recently (Geek alert--you can skip this paragraph if you like) and setting up a Gallery Page in my Notion area for the items I'd like to sell and also point to my PayPal for payment (not sure how to do that yet tho). Anyway, I still need to sort out the pictures and decide on pricin

Follow my blog with Bloglovin Geek alert - skip this post if you're not interested in the sorted details of how to 'downsize' from a Web hosted Blog to a free one (like this on on Blogger) and switch your email accounts without losing any emails in the process. Since I haven't posted anything to my old blog in a long time--ok probably since the Divorce (hmmm, wonder if there is a correlation here?) and my Web hosting renewal is coming up again (pretty pricey, especially if you're only using the email part0, I thought I'd take a long, hard look at what I have and how I can streamline everything. This is nothing against the Web hosting company, I just didn't have a need for the heavy-duty Wordpress maintained (with plug-ins, admin dashboard, etc.) Website services anymore. And, since my domain names (I have a couple) came up for renewal, I noticed that the company I use for that ( hover.com ) also offered a couple of simple email hosting options--yay! So, whil

This one is kind of an oldie--I posted this on my old Blog a few years ago, but these are so easy to make, so I thought I'd share them again. Here is the link with the tutorial I have been following. It’s from   eHow.com .  I’ve made a few of these already and even talked my daughter through making one–it really is that easy!

Note: This is a re-post from my old Blog. I'm still actively using Skillshare and the post is definitely worth repeating 😊  I'm always on the lookout to learn new Art-related things and visit YouTube daily for any paper crafting or drawing or doodling videos. While watching one such video, the author shared a link to a training subscription site, Skillshare , which was new to me at the time. Well, long story short, I got hooked and subscribed pretty much on the spot. I have watched a ton of courses since then and I must say, the subscription is definitely worth the money. I really like that most of the classes are relatively short, so you can easily carve out a little time to watch a complete course. There are so many to chose from, but recently I have been looking at a lot of courses for illustrating and creating on the iPad using the Procreate App. And one of my favorite Instructors is Liz Kohler Brown. Here are just a few of the awesome classes I’ve taken: Paint Tropi