Making Cards

Here is a tutorial on how to make my collage cards! I have been so delighted at the interest people have shown in them, so I made this tutorial about a year ago to share. Please send me pictures if you decide to make some! Also, feel free to browse my Etsy store for more ideas!

What you’ll need:
-Pre-scored cards or cardstock (any size is fine!)
-Collage elements (book pages, tissue paper, etc.)
-Glue (I like using glue sticks. I have used mod podge and it eliminates some of the texture of the collage elements and I don’t like it as much.)
-Washi tape or stickers (This is optional! If you had enough collage elements, you don’t even need this! It’s just what I use.)
-Scissors
-Pens or markers

Watercolors

I am new to watercolor as of December 2023, but it has quickly become a new obsession. Not only is it fun, I have found it a great way to combat anxiety. And bonus: set up and clean up are quicker with watercolor than other painting, too. So if I have only 20 minutes or so, I can paint in that short of time and come back to it later (in fact, so much of watercolor is layering that it actually helps to wait).

Here are a few pictures of my playtime:

Announcing "The Enchanted Grove"!

I am so excited to announce the publication of my first coloring book! As you probably already know, I love to make coloring pages as a restful hobby. It began for me in early 2020, during the first lockdown days of the pandemic. I realized that making art felt too overwhelming, but I still needed a creative outlet. That’s when I first posted this hedgehog coloring page. Something about the simple black lines felt soothing to me, so I kept going. I was soon putting coloring pages like this one in our church’s Easter book and doing customized pages like this one.

Since then, every month, I’ve posted a few more, including some activity pages. Finally, earlier this year, I took a class on how to publish your own coloring book. In my excitement, I was tempted to rush its completion, but I tried to take my time so I could be proud of every page, and especially the cover.

If you do color any of the pages (either by purchasing a copy here or by downloading some of the sample pages I’ve posted), please share your versions with me. One of my surprising joys in creating these coloring pages is seeing how other people use color to make them unique and beautiful.

Floral Abstracts

I’ve been enjoying designing these large floral abstracts! Not only are they so fun, but I find them quite challenging because there really are no rules or right answers. I have to just decide what I think looks good, and I could be totally wrong. They also work well on POD sites like my Society6 shop! See below for the latest three I have done, and some examples of them on some items.

Fun with Faces

I could only get two four out of seven of the latest “Fun with Faces” drawing challenged that I joined, hosted by Charly Clements. But I do love the ones I got done! Feel free to guess what the 3-word prompts were for each one!

2023 Word of the Year

I never understood the point of a word(s) of the year until I started thinking of it like a lens. Like if I could put on my “grateful glasses” in order to see the world that way. It’s like a way of training your mind.

I also don’t think you need a new year to start putting on different lenses! Start anytime! And here are a few words to give you some ideas. Feel free to save any of these to use as a reminder for yourself.

Do you choose a word for each year?

Frosty and Festive

This month I entered a festive drawing challenge and here are a few of the pieces!

My Shop

Every year, I wish that I had signed up to do some Christmas craft shows. I feel like I come alive around Christmas, because I can do craft after craft, gift after gift. But even though I never participate in any craft shows, I use my love of crafts and gifting for friends, family, my amazing Children’s Ministry volunteers, and the kids at church. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll see some of them pop up in my stories, and sometimes I give mini tutorials.

All this to get to my point: Although I do not have any crafts for sale (I still take occasional crochet orders), I do have a shop on Society6 where you’ll find a lot of my artwork, including the Christmas ones pictured below. But I love browsing all the other artwork on Society6 as well, and you can get a huge variety of products! So take a look and support an artist this holiday season (it doesn’t have to be me!).

“Facetober” Drawing Challenge on Instagram

This past month, I participated in a drawing challenge for each of October’s 31 days. Every day, we were given a three prompts and had to reflect them in our drawing/illustration. This was a challenge for me, but I’m so proud of myself for finishing every day!

Here are some of my favorites.

Let’s Notice Together

I think about the book The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker a lot since reading it last year. The subtitle says it all: “131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday.” I loved the idea that how you notice and what you do with what you’ve noticed can all be an art form. And that is pretty much what the entire list is about: what people have decided to notice and how. I took some notes and had a few ideas for how I could replicate some in my own life, but none have come to much fruition. Still, I can’t get the book out of my head, because my biggest takeaway was just to take time to notice, well, anything!

For a while, I tried to notice anything odd, and even better, snap a picture of it. I chose “odd” rather than “beautiful” because oddities tell stories and make you curious. The first example that comes to mind is when I saw a motorcycle parked on the sidewalk outside the local library. Immediately questions came to mine and a story formed: Who parked it there? Were they in a hurry for a certain book? What book can make someone that hurried? Is there treasure I should know about? Scavenger hunt? Or maybe it was someone important? I have no idea, but to this day, I wonder!

On another day, I saw a orange traffic cone perched at the top of a tree. How did it get there? Did someone put it there? Was it an industrious squirrel? Or a giant?

These are fun examples, and I hope I can keep up this practice. But it’s actually not the point of this post. The point is that efforts to be present in my every day life, to “eliminate hurry”*, to practice noticing, are worth pursuing.

As a Christian, I actually think I have the same calling: to lift up my head and see life for what it really is. And if I use my lenses of “beauty, freedom, and abundance”, the results can be profound. I really love the idea that not only can noticing be an art form, it can also be a spiritual discipline. (I would argue that creating any art is actually a spiritual practice, which I’ve always known in my soul but have learned more practically from these art classes.)

So I will continue to notice oddities (there may be an occasional blog post), but also every season I want to pursue noticing different things that I set up beforehand, engaging many or all of my senses. For example, this fall, I want to notice anytime:

I see the colors of the trees.

I hear the sound of the leaves on the ground.

I smell and taste fall spices.

I feel soft blankets.

All these things come so naturally in autumn, and maybe that’s why I love this season. Maybe I’ve spent my whole life really noticing fall, and therefore finding the most joy this time of year. That’s good. That’s the whole point.

And it’s also good to start with an easy one!

Will you join me in taking notice, in the hopes that it will keep us really living in the present? What goals would you set for yourself to notice this season?

*This quote is from a chapter I read from the book The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg.

I just became an Amazon Associate, because I link to books so often on my blog! As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, so if you want the book and to support me, use my links in this blog post. Thank you!! ❤️

An Abundance of Time

If you’ve been reading my blog or looking at my artwork recently, you will already know that the three words that I’ve been meditating on are beauty, freedom, and abundance. These are the three areas I have been trying to live into and see everywhere. And believe it or not, you can find these things everywhere, if you will just have eyes to see them. Sometimes “eyes to see” just means taking the time to look, sometimes it means shifting your perspective, sometimes it could even mean some serious self-care or mental healthcare. 

Today I want to talk about my path of seeing the abundance of God, and even how it relates it to my anxiety. This is just my story, and everyone will have a different story to tell. But I hope it can be an encouragement to someone.

I have heard that anxiety is your body being constantly ready for something to happen, even if there is no immediate threat! I feel this a lot when it comes to time or productivity. My natural inclination when I feel high anxiety is to just go with it and keep doing and doing and doing until I can cross off as many things as possible from my list. Logically, this should make me feel better, right? If I’m anxious about there being enough time to get everything done, then a few hours of high productivity should make me feel better! Unfortunately, that’s never how it works. 

I remember the exact moment it hit me that the opposite is actually true. I was starting to get that panicky feeling. It was getting late in the day and I was tired. I started to notice piles of stuff everywhere (that’s usually how it starts for me: noticing all there is to do). It suddenly feels like I am drowning and I will never be free, never get done, never be good enough. My impulse was to get to work and push through. But then it occurred to me that maybe I actually needed rest, instead.

Now, resting when I am feeling panicky or anxious is really hard! Taking deep breaths, putting on music, taking a walk, playing the piano, or even just sitting outside are all things that have helped me in those moments. Audiobooks help a lot, too. I don’t have it in me to read, but listening can be soothing.

My spiritual director helped me come up with a breath prayer for moments like these as well. I told her about a time earlier that week when I was telling myself “I just have to push through the rest of this day” when a very clear thought came into my head: God doesn’t want me living like this. Every moment is a gift, I don’t want to squander them by just “pushing through”. 

But the truth is, laundry still has to get done, dishes still have to be washed, children still have to be fed. And honestly, those moments won’t just stop coming. So the next time I feel that impulse, praying in the form of deep breaths:

Inhale: Lord, lift up my head

Exhale: To see your beauty

In taking a deep breath, I literally have to change my posture and actually lift up my head. But I am metaphorically changing my posture, too. I am asking for “eyes to see”, even in those hard moments. 

One of my goals this year was to do more things that have no purpose, or that don’t make sense on the outside. And with the aforementioned realization of needing rest instead of more work, it suddenly felt like this goal was the answer! Just taking the time when you feel like there is no time somehow multiplies the time! This is God’s economy at work, friends. This is abundance.

Rob Walker, in The Art of Noticing, claims that taking the time to notice our surroundings in different ways sparks creativity. I say absolutely yes, and so much more. Taking the time to do something different, or seemingly pointless, helps us see the abundance of God! Not just in our time (but that, too!) but in our world! 

And I have found that in making an effort to take that time, my anxiety about having enough time has lessened. 

Surrendering this to God has been hard, and breaking the patterns of 40 years of living is definitely going to be a process - one that I am doing imperfectly (and that’s OK!). I know God is continuing a good work in me and it’s bigger than I can put in this post. But I have been amazed at how much I have been set free in the surrendering, and how much more I can see of the beauty all around and the abundant life He promises.

This is a little infographic to help me remember that God’s economy looks different from ours. Somehow He multiplies where we hoard.

A Harvest of Abundance

I wrote a few weeks (maybe months?) ago about an art journaling class I am taking hosted by my friend, Farrell. In the process of taking this class, three words began to emerge as powerful and meaningful to me: beauty, freedom, and abundance. I’ve noticed how somehow those three words are showing up in every art journal page, so I decided to do a blog series featuring some of my pages, and just explaining my thought process of each.

This page’s assignment was to create a pumpkin, perfect for this time of year. I wanted to paint a teal, knobbly pumpkin with lots of texture. I used a stencil of grapes to make the texture you see all over the pumpkin.

Grapes have become a symbol of abundance for me. And harvest time really is a time of abundance, isn’t it? The harvest is coming in before the winter and all of a sudden it’s easy to see the abundance of food and life. But all too soon, winter sets in and our mindset of scarcity is back. In fact, I would say that most of our lives are lived out of scarcity. Sometimes I wonder if we actually prefer to live in scarcity: there’s always not enough time, not enough money, not enough space, not enough love.

But seeing the world with eyes of abundance is worth fighting for, and I believe it’s what God wants for us! I highly recommend this video by the Bible Project on Generosity. This is exactly what the video talks about: that scarcity is a mindset, and Jesus calls us to live differently.

In this pumpkin I wrote “a harvest of abundance” in the corner, because not only does a harvest imply abundance, but I also want to harvest a mindset of abundance in my life. It takes work; it takes a shift of my thoughts. But I know it’s worth it.

Beauty, Freedom, Abundance

These three words have been on my heart the past few months and I finally realized that this is how I want to see the world, with eyes that seek beauty, freedom, and abundance. I want them to be written on the frame in which I see every landscape, every sorrow, every joy, every face. But sometimes I need the reminder to actively seek these things, and not expect them to just come passing by.

Today I read in The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker that you should take a piece of plastic and point it at a scene. Then describe that scene with markers on the piece of plastic. Now shift the plastic to another scene and see how the words could possibly fit. I thought I can make that work with my three words as well!

So this is the scene I look at from my office, and these are the three things I want to seek in every place I look. It’s easy to see them here. But may I be the kind of person that can find these three things anywhere and then help to show them to others as well.

A couple faces

A picture of my daughter, done in a slightly different style than I usually do. But I like how it turned out!

This drawing is for the Luca challenge on Instagram! It’s me as part human, part sea monster!

Paper Dolls

These three girls remind me of paper dolls, so look for them in my activity pages soon! It was just fun practicing different eye types, hair styles, and dresses.

Artwork Update

I have not been posting much because I have completely lost control of my summer schedule. You know how in the beginning of summer you put together a “Summer Bucket List” and a daily schedule and you have such high hopes because this summer is going to be different? Well it’s only July 9 and I have given up on the daily schedule or getting any of my own work done!

But just because I haven’t been posting or illustrating (either for my upcoming book or for Instagram), doesn’t mean I haven’t been art-ing. First of all, I have been taking an art journaling course with my friend Farrell called “Take Heart”. I highly recommend this course! It has been so fun to just completely let loose and be free of expectations in my art! And it is geared towards anyone - you do not have to have any prior artistic knowledge (or be local, as the lessons are on YouTube and the meetings are over Zoom).

I’ve also been playing around with different digital art, as seen in the gallery below. I love to support other artists and one of them creates beautiful brushes for Procreate (the app I use for most of my illustrations). Her brushes are the ones I used for these, and I just love how they turned out. I will be adding all of these to my shop on Society6.

So that’s my summer so far! What about you? Have you lost control of your summer, too?

Some Fairy Sketches

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to my newest character: a fairy named Lucy. While I’m not ready to show you any of my actual finished illustrations of her yet, I thought it might be interesting to see some of the sketches that got me to my final product. Do you have a favorite?

Animal Illustrations

I have been practicing illustrations that I think would be more appealing to children, so they mostly include animals doing human things. Here are my first two, and I’m taking suggestions for other animals and/or activities you’d like to see them doing!