Our first prompt is to start prepping the pages and designing the cover to our journal. I had an idea of a stamp I wanted to use but when I stamped the image on my cover, it was just too small. Gesso to the rescue and start over again. I pulled out my acrylic paints and started to play setting up the scene for twiggy trees and leaves on the background. My tree stamp was all ready ... but, wait, it's too small. Oh no, and there are no photoshop image handles to grab for resizing. What to do? What to do?
Breathe, relax, think this through. This is only a twiggy tree which really is an easy thing to draw. Anyone can draw a twiggy tree. I even had kindergartners creating trees by blowing through a straw into the tempra paint pool on their paper.
Step One: load the paint onto the palette
Step Two: wet the brush and load with paint
Step Three: check back for a visual on your twiggy tree images and start with the trunk.
Step Four: just keep going adding branches, and maybe a row of bushes behind the tree, a few mountains in the background ... hey, I could even stamp some of those smaller trees in the background so they make a little bit of a forest further away.
Step Five: dab some leaves on the ground and just a few clinging to the branches yet.
And that's how a cover comes together for a Fall Journal.
