This page layout is a little bit of a mess, but that is because I’ve been doing so much work. I made a batch of Artist Trading Cards and included some leftover bits from that on the left hand page. These include my new business card stickers from MOO that I put on the reverse side. People love these as my business cards. It is like they get there own little piece of art. I love the stickers and I hope you do too!

The right page has a prototype of one of the pieces of my Draw the Circle Wide mandala that is under construction. I made a photocopy and painted it with gouache to test how it would interact with acrylic matte medium. No smearing or bleeding of colors and the colors turned out nice and clear. I think this is how I’m going to paint these sections. Part of the development for that mandala was finding just the right purple. I also used this layout to document all my new Prismacolor colored pencils.

It turned out that I needed to use magenta to get any purples that I liked. What was interesting was experimenting with Payne’s Gray as a blue. It also demonstrated that I have a lot of shades of blue and not as many reds. I may explore that further. Or maybe there just isn’t the same variety of hues. Do any of you know about that? In any case I used Ultramarine blue and magenta to make the purple for my iris.

Another feature of the right page of the gratitude journal entry was my playing with reticula in a mandala. What is a reticula?

It is a pattern that you put in a grid. Changing the orientation creates different  meta-patterns. This was one of the really wonderful things we explored at the Certified Zentangle Teacher seminar I went to in April. There is a lot of gratitude for my husband in these pages, too. I haven’t used one of my stencils for him in a while. Maybe this week. What are you grateful for? What is new in your art practice?

I hope you have a beautiful day.