Here's one exercise for your art journal that you can incorporate. It's very simple. I use whatever brush I'm comfortable with one color of paint, usually a fairly bright color. It's kind of cheerful and it's unexpected. And again, this is for practice and just for you to work on thoughts, ideas, and come up with some brushstroke techniques. So first thing we'll do is we'll just dive right in with a very bold color.

We're just going to make repeated patterns. I've already sketched out a box, six boxes for each page. And so each box will have a different pattern. I'm going here I'm just repeating the same pattern over and over. These are just little plus signs. Working on a right angle, Again, it doesn't have to be perfect because this is gonna wind up being actually a shadow.

When we're all when it's all said and done you can work on replicating the same size over and over again. Next technique, the next mark making parallel lines. You get a feel for the paint. This is a good way to practice if you have a new paint that you're working with. You'll get a feel for the paint, how smooth it is, how bright it goes on how transparent how easy it moves for fights you and you get a feel for what size brush you can use with each thickness of paint as well. Just gonna repeat this over.

Again if it shows brushstrokes, I kind of like that look when it's done. This is just for me in my art journal or some ideas and I might expand on that later. after it dries I'll take a look and see what I liked what I didn't like about each thing. Here I'm just gonna make hollow triangles. You can do this with any shape. You want some overlap more can be to go and test the length of the line I can make.

And I'll just repeat that line. If you hear that mark, it's that you're running out of paint. It's too late, you've already run out of paint on your paper. But again, I like the idea of the brushstroke, the look of the brushstroke, so I'm okay with that for my journal for painting, however, I might not want that. Very thick shapes. Fill that right in.

And over here I originally was just going to do the two shapes. I think I'm gonna incorporate a small little shape in the gap here. Maybe I'll do a half one over here. Okay, here we'll just do a grid. Now we'll go across with the lines using acrylic paint on the mixed media paper. The acrylic paint will dry fairly quickly and then we can get to our next layer.

This page will add some more. Let's go and do dashes running down the length of the page of the box. He was gonna make little seeds repeatedly fill the box. This works on just that little organic shape. Here we're gonna make long ovals. Just fill up the box a little bit of overlap on some not on all.

Here we're just gonna do staggered line almost like polka dots, but with a line. Here we're going to do lines made up of dotted lines. The last one, the June never ending pattern. no rhyme or reason to this, we're just connecting over and over again. And if we find ourselves that we've backed ourselves into a corner, we'll just start again. We'll let this dry and then we'll add our top coat.

For next and final layer, this is where you, you can work with different things, try different techniques and add different different parts, different layers as you'd like. Because we put down such a bold color, it's now fun to decide if we want to place our finer line in black right on top of it or off to the side, which create makes the pink turns the pink into a shadow. I kind of like the way that looks. It might not work for all of our marks that were made, but it couldn't be is a very interesting effect. I can come back to my sketchbook when I'm working on another piece and decide what kind of geometric element I want to add to the background. So for this one, I can use this as a reference tool, these pluses that I have The double layer, the hot pink, and then they black on top.

But I can also look at it and say, Hmm, do I want to try it with a closer grouping or throw in a different shape, maybe add a different color. I'm still undecided, I can just break out another page and try another square with my different techniques. Because the black is so intense and so dark and a neutral, it really makes the pink pop. And then when it's all said and done, the pink almost disappears at the same time. It's kind of an interesting effect. I like to use bright colors, like TEALS blues, yellows, as my base color.

So here on the last row, I think I'm going to combine Connect the two and see effect what effect that gives us. It becomes a different pattern all together. In here, I think you all just go over the center of the triangles. See what happens there kind of changes the shape of here it looks like a butterfly butterfly wings the way they intersected. So that was an unexpected experience to learn about that. Here I think I'm just going to outline these large shapes because they're so large.

Maybe I'll add another, another shape within it. Up and down. Again, the brushstrokes really show I kind of like that look, but I can easily go over it again if I want to eliminate the brushstroke look at more paint. hear another variation was would be that I could have gone in between the pinks here I'm just gonna go slightly off want to add enough color so that it does look like it's on top of the pink and not behind it Hear I'm just gonna follow through with what we've already done. The simple pattern Same thing with the C's here. For these ovals, I like the way the brushstrokes really show.

Think I might do multiple ovals on top with the black. Have a lot of brushstrokes really emphasize that on this one. So there are a lot of variations to do it. This is where it's good to just play in your journal. And here I think I'm just gonna run down the whole line length of the stripe. Cuz this brushes a little thinner.

I can connect make some connections here that I couldn't make with a thicker pink line. There you have it. Some practice for your journal