The Wonderful Word for This Wednesday is “Prompts”

It was my birthday a few days ago, and you can probably guess what I asked for!  You guess it – ART SUPPLIES.

This is brilliant, you know why?  Because art supplies are the gift that keeps giving all year long and beyond.

Sidebar: No matter how many or what kind of art supplies I have, there are always more that I want.  And this is why what I actually want/need is a She Shed, but that is another whole topic.

Anyhoo, this year I asked for this deck of Art Journal Prompt cards and I got them!

The next morning, I got straight to it.  I had saved a special journal for this purpose and couldn’t wait to get into it.

Here are the directions:

So I pulled my cards and here were my results (front and back):

Please play close attention to this one:

Purple

Yes, my undies were purple.  I hardly ever paint or create with purple.  You know me, I’m mostly into the aqua and blues and the occasional pinks and oranges for florals, but hardly ever purple.

And this is why prompts (and different kind of limitations) are so incredibly good for us.  Prompts push us out of ruts and comfort zones.

The first thing I did was gather ALL of my paints, pens, pastels, etc. that were in the purple category and got to work on a scratch piece of paper painting and making marks (waves of course as per the card above) to see what shades of purple I wanted to work with.  Read on to see what I did with this scratch paper later…

It turns out, I kinda like some of my purple paints, pencils, pens!

Fabric

Now this one was tricky.  I do love to use little bits of fibers in my mixed media pieces, but it’s often coffee stained cheese cloth or just cheese cloth and the like.  Looking through all of my fabric scraps, I could not find an inch of purple anywhere, but then I recalled that I recently ordered these little lacy white flowers with which to adorn my overalls.

I got to work making one of the white lacy flowers purple by wetting a piece of watercolor paper, spreading the purple paints on there and placing the flower on it while it was still wet.  Then, I walked away and let it dry.

When I returned, it wasn’t as purple as I wanted, so I painted over the top of the flower only, with the same purple paints, and walked away again.  The next time I checked it, it was perfection!

Now I had a beautiful purple flower AND a print of said flower.  I glued the fabric flower right onto my journal.   I love it!

Do you see how this prompt helped me to get out of my box and pushed me further than I would normally go?  WINNING!

Conclusion

Through this one combination of prompts, I created many keepers!  AND I taught myself a new technique with the fabric flower and watercolor.  These limitations forced me to problem solve.

Furthermore, my creative juices were flowing and sparking and just doing all those things that feel amazing to our brains.

And here’s the thing, there are ENDLESS more combinations for me to try.  I mean, for a start, maybe tomorrow I’ll be wearing tie dye underwear!

Oh yeah, I said I’d tell you what I did with the original scrap piece of paper that I swatched all of my colors on, so here it is:

And if you’re thinking, “She didn’t even do the ‘journaling’ card!”, yes I did:

To recap, here are just a few benefits of using prompts in your art practice:

• Prompts push us out of ruts and comfort zones.
• Prompts help us get out of our boxes and push us farther than we would normally go.
• Prompts create limitations which force us to problem solve.
• Prompts get our creative juices flowing and sparking which feels amazing to our brains.

Go ahead and use these prompts yourself!  What color underwear are you wearing today?

Kim Snider, Virtuoso, Signing off