A Busy Little Blog Post

There's a lot going on in this blog post this morning!

 First, I was so excited when I opened Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's Friday post this morning! Julie has a regular Friday feature called Art Journal Every Day. Each Friday she offers a post about her daily art journaling practice and will include guest artist interviews, photos of her art journal pages, tutorials, etc. Last week she did a post about the five basic art journal supplies she would recommend to a beginner art journaler and then asked her readers to submit a picture of the five items they would add to her list. So I submitted my photos and found this morning that Julie had included my photos in her post this morning. Thank you Julie! Here is the link: Balzerdesigns.typepad/artjournaleveryday

Second, I have a new tutorial on the blog: Altered Book Binder Journal. I have had so many requests for instructions on how I make my art journal binders from old books, I finally took some pictures as I made my most recent journal. Check out the tutorial page on the tabs at the top of the blog.

Last, I have some recent art journal pages for The Documented Life Project and The Art of Practising Gratitude challenge.

Doc Life Week 18 page spread

Doc Life wk 18 side 1

Doc Life wk 18 side 2

The Art of Practising Gratitude day 2: Positive

I hope your weekend includes time to be creative!

Inspiration and Painting Circles Tutorial

Here it is, my first tutorial!

In my last post I wrote about the creative inspiration I get from seeing through creative eyes. Another way I get inspiration is through other artists ~ through their blogs and through taking classes.

Last week I followed a link on Pinterest to the blog of Connie at http://artfulplay.blogspot.com/. Connie's post was about the circles she painted that were inspired by the art of Roben-Marie Smith at www.robenmarie.com. I've taken some of Roben-Marie's classes and I love her use of circles on her art journal pages. Other artists I follow who use circles a lot are Julie Fei-Fan Balzer http://balzerdesigns.typepad.com/balzer_designs/ and Ronda Palazzari  http://rondapalazzari.typepad.com/helpmeronda/.

I love circles! I Stencil them, I use punched out ones, and I paint them. A sampling of a few of my past pages with circles:

So, after reading Connie's post I got in the mood to paint circles. I have found over time that I enjoy the results best when I paint circles with my fingers. Below are pages I made from last weeks "playing".
These circles were painted directly in my art journal.

Then I painted more and used them for my Documented Life Project challenge and pages.

After posting my pages in the Document Life Project Facebook group there was some interest in how I made my painted circles. So, giving credit where credit is due, inspired by Roben-Marie Smith and Connie at Artful Play and the many other artists I follow who love to use circles, I made a tutorial on my process for painting circles. Due to the length of it I made the tutorial on a separate page. You will find it in the links at the top of the blog.

I would love to see what you do with painted circles so I've attached a link-up below. Please share a link to your blog, Flickr page or Pinterest page and share what you have made using painted circles.