Painted Foundation

A good background in art is like having a good foundation to build on.  It is what turns a journal full of doodles into an “art” journal.  As I begin my new sketchbook, I paint a few pages as backgrounds, but I leave most of them blank.  On those blank pages I do plenty of doodling, list making, jotting down phone numbers and all kinds of random bits to remember.  Then, I go back later and paint over the pages I am done with.  There is no pressure for every doodle to be a masterpiece, because if I don’t like it, I just paint over it.  My sketchbook can multitask as my working notepad, which is important because realistically, I am not going to carry around more than one book!  The page above was first my list of things to do for my daughter’s graduation open house.  Now that its over, those pages are available for a new project so that even journal pages get repurposed! I like to leave a bit of the original showing through though because it suits the layers of my life that build on each other.  Art on the foundation of family.  Wise quotes cover the layer of my own rambles.  Beauty conquering the jumbled chaos of scribbles.  Every layer has its own meaning, and contribution to the page.