If you haven’t done 21 secrets yet – you should!  It is a huge value and they’ve extended it this year!  Dirty Footprints Studio is the place to find out all about it.  In celebration of all her big news she’s challenging us to all come clean with our art journaling secrets!

My big secret is I have all sorts of thoughts – often unproductive gremlins saying useless things.  So, to quiet the gremlins I write what they say.  I never want to read it again later so I use my messy handwriting.  This is frequently in the background of my art journals.  Here I used watercolor pencils and wrote on top of the words with different colors.

Spritz with a little water and mush it around with a dry paintbrush.  Now I have silenced those gremlins.

Here’s the finished page with my current favorite – umbrella man.

Do you ever have those great scraps that you love but aren’t sure what to do with them?  This page was my scrap challenge.  The circles were left overs from die cutting.  The yellow wonky rectangles were from a strip of leftover paper.  This page took 2 months to create – it was my catch all and experimentation page.  Leftover paint on a brush went on here.  If I had a brush full of matte medium I glued something on.  If I had a scrap I’d punch something in it.  My grubby cheese cloth that I wipe my brushes on added texture.  This page was great for my soul – I didn’t waste a thing and if  I was stuck on another project a few minutes on here often nudged me forward.