Inspiration Everywhere - Art Journal {Cover}

Jessica Sprague's Inspiration Everywhere has been a fantastic class! I just loved how many different creative sources & mediums the class assignments were pulled from.  In fact, it has drawn & pushed me to a variety of inspiration wells to drink from & materials to play with.

There has been a variety of assignments & I will be back to share more of them, but first I wanted to share an ongoing assignment in the class, our Art Journals.  And what do we start with first?  But, the cover, of course!

While Jessica Sprague embraces design & creativity through technology, her site also allows for the scissor & glue types as well.  And though I'm learning more & more techno/digi options each day (& there were digi options for these pages as well), I chose to pull out acrylic paints, sparkle glaze, Tim Holtz masks, & my favorite Spica glitter pens.

Ironically, Tim Holtz was demonstrating his masks (in reverse) on today's 12 Tags of Christmas tag  (talk about a fountain of inspiration!) and I will definitely have to remember to stamp with them next time!

I painted over the alpha letters 'a', 'R', and 't' first with a red, then orange, then yellow.  While the background bright pink was straight out of the bottle, I mixed the other three colors for the shades I wanted and added a sparkle glaze that I had on hand (it adds bits of glitter to the paint).  I also dry brushed on all three colors around the perimeter of the cover.

'Journal' and 'Inspiration Everywhere' are written in black & while it seems that I was not able to pick it up with the camera, they are traced over with a black spica glitter pen & do indeed sparkle.

I didn't paint the left edge, under the spiral, intentionally.  Initially, I was going to just tie color coordinated ribbons all over the spiral, but a wee different idea has sprung.....I'll share more with the next art journal post! ;>:>

What is lighting your creative fires these days?  Both Jessica Sprague & Tim Holtz have lit many creative sparks for me and I'd love to know what's working for you!

I'm linking up!