Purple Sweet Pea Card

I have been trying to play with some different colors than the ones that I tend to reach for all the time and purples are a color combo that I tend to shy away from a lot for some reason. I like purples, so I am not sure why I don't reach for them a little more often. I love my Sweet Pea images when I am playing with different color combos for several reasons. One is that there is almost always enough things in the frame of each image that I can see how different color families look when paired together. Another reason is that there is always plenty of area for me to practice shading with those combos too. Sometimes I will sit down and stamp the same image four or five times and see how different that I can make them look, just by changing all the color combos. When I do that I make sure that each of the colors are different, I will use different skin tones, hair colors and different backgrounds, I try to make them as different as possible Maybe one day I will post photos of one of those coloring sessions. 

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I have been in an "experimental" mood lately. Pretty much with everything too; cooking, reading new books, and ways of being creative. I have been trying to combine things that I have never used before on paper. Really I am just playing around, but it is fun! I have been seeing art journals and such around the internet and I thought that would be a great place to keep my "practice" papers. That way they will be all together and thanks to my stash of Post-It notes, I can jot down colors, techniques, supplies used so that I have a go-to reference of things that I liked and didn't like.

I don't know if you are like me or not, but sometimes I get very intimidated by a new blank book, be it a journal or sketch pad or anything else. One of the things that I like about a brand new book is the potential that they hold......that anything can go in there--a great story. a piece of poetry or art--and the contents are decided by the user and there is no limit at all as to what could be. But therein lies the intimidation. I'm always afraid of ruining the book by making a mistake and I always felt like the book was ruined if it contained a mistake. It has taken me over forty years to get to the point that it doesn't matter if I make a mistake. I think that bears repeating: IT DOESN'T MATTER IF I MAKE A MISTAKE. And if I am just experimenting in my book, then it isn't necessarily a mistake at all. Very freeing let me tell you!

Most of you know that my friend's two daughters craft with me a lot. I was Jenna's preschool teacher and have been crafting with Samantha since she was literally old enough to old a crayon. Often they would get a little frustrated when their creations didn't look like mine. And I have always told them "Your art should look like your art and no one else's". I have said those words so many times and now I have my little crafting buddy who isn't afraid to make a mistake, so she paints, draws and whatever with abandon. I did a fabulous job teaching them that concept but I didn't listen to myself very well at all.

Until now.