Art Journal Every Day: Inspired by Journal Girl

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

I follow Samantha Kira Harding (aka Journal Girl) on instagram.  (She has been an Adventures in Arting podcast guest -- episode 7 -- in the past.)  Recently she has been posting some beautiful floral drawings with text.  I think they're amazing and beautiful and I immediately wanted to make one of my own.

Here is one of hers:

And here is the page I created inspired by her style:

Creating artwork inspired by someone else's style is always an interesting adventure.  I think there's a great deal of learning to be had.  So, what did I learn from this exercise?  Hmmmmm...a few things:

• I think Samie uses Copic markers.  To keep things in a similar vein, I used Permapaque markers on top of a gessoed surface, plus a white Sharpie.  I suspected, and it was confirmed that working on a gesso-ed surface allowed me to smear the markers around a bit so that I could blend the colors more than the Permapaques usually let you.  It also mimics (a bit) the blending that Copics do.
• I wasn't sure what I was going to do traveling with my art journal.  But it turns out that this spread was an absolutely perfect art journaling project for travel.  No paint and easy to stop and go.  
• I usually create words separately from patterns.  I enjoyed creating the pattern behind the words instead.  Along the way I learned that you have to be really careful about making the words stand out when you do that.  Notice the multiple layers of shadowing and outlining on the text.
• I definitely brought myself to the project.  I think that's an important part of being inspired.  You need to take what excites you and fill in the rest with yourself!  There are certain flower and leaf shapes that I always return to when I doodle.

We're all inspired by the things and people around us.  And that is wonderful and exciting and necessary!  I do think it's important to pass on the credit when you're consciously inspired by someone else's work, though.  What have you created lately inspired by someone else's art?

Here is this week's linky list:

An InLinkz Link-up

Thanks for stopping by!

---

P.S. If you missed yesterday's live chat, you can catch the replay here.