The process.

Here's a step by step art journal page.   I'm not all that pleased with it but it is okay.   I might be almost done with my journaling phase.  With all that I have been going through lately it has helped me to cope but I am thinking that maybe my busy life will resume soon and I will be too busy to do as much journaling.  I still may do it at night when my daughter is reading our read aloud.  Otherwise, I might have to take over the reading again, so she can knit or crochet.  :-P   Anyway, here's my process. 

I randomly paint the pages using Crayola watercolors, then sometimes close the book on them while they are drying to make this weird effect.  Sometimes I get fancy with the painting, but not usually.

I then measured and drew a border.  I found in a lot of my free hand border making of the past that I was very, very crooked and sometimes I would end up with a really good drawing inside a really crooked border and it ruined all my good work in my opinion.

I free-handed some lettering and an arch shape.

Then I drew some flowers.  Flowers are what I like to draw.  Flowers and trees.  I have branched out in a couple and tried to draw birds, but I'm not that good of an artist.

I reached into my big bag of markers and pulled out random ones.  This is a huge old craft bag of my mom's and sometimes a marker lid will come off and the marker will saturate the bag with what looks like blood stains or something else, depending on the color.  I have tried other bags, but keep coming back to this one, even though it is ugly, I can separate markers for future use into the many pockets and also throw even my largest journals in there for carrying.  I sometimes journal at my daughter's piano lessons and at her craft sales.

I colored in the flowers and letters and drew a leaf border.

Then I hunted out all my greens.  I have a hard time keeping green markers because I use so much green.

Then I colored in the leafy border.  My daughter says it is too much green on this one and I think she's right.  I think some kind of blue border would have looked better.

Then I began the black outlining.  You can see if you look closely (sorry about the blurriness of this one) that it stops halfway through the top of the green squiggly line because 12:30 arrived last night and that was bedtime. 

Have a good day everyone!