Creative Squad

Hello from my Creative Squad! Today we have a journal spread from Jordan Hill who creates a moody night scene using my Powerhouse and Row Houses foam stamps and our theme: Good Morning Good Evening – Are you a Morning Person or a Night Owl? Or maybe neither? Create a project inspired by your preferred time of day – when you are in good spirits, doing what you love, and enjoying life.

Hello, everyone! I’m very excited to be back with a new project! When I first started to consider August’s theme of ‘Good Morning Good Evening’, I’ll admit I was a little stumped. I do not consider myself either a morning person or a night person; I’m more of a middle of the day kind of person. With that being said, I ended up creating my project based on the idea of night; I quite like the nighttime aesthetics, and I’ve been known to incorporate a good night skyline into my artwork. With all that being said, let’s get into it!

The first thing I did was select a spread in my journal to work on. As soon as I decided to work with the idea of night, I knew these were the pages I wanted to use. Months ago I glued this moon collage piece onto a magazine background, and it’s been sitting around waiting for me to create something with it ever since! You can also see that the left hand page already has the beginnings of a face ready for me to draw on top of!

Next, I cut out a piece of paper approximately the size of the moon to use as a mask. I placed this circle on top of the moon collage piece. Then, using a combination of Nathalie’s Powerhouse Foam Stamp and Row Houses Foam Stamp, along with some white acrylic paint, I started to layer up some buildings to create a skyline! I mainly used the Powerhouse Foam Stamp near the bottom of my page, while the Row Houses Foam Stamp helped to create some of the buildings up the sides! The stamps made creating a skyline very easy, where it would usually take a while to draw something like this!

After the paint had dried, I wanted to add a little more definition to the buildings, so I used a yellow Posca Pen to color in some of the windows! This was an extremely relaxing process; I simply followed some of the lines in the stamped images to emphasize them.

The next step was to add the figure. In order to do this, I simply started sketching over top of the pre-existing shape of a face with my trusty Indigo Prismacolor Premier colored pencil. I also added some long flowing hair. When I was drawing the hair, I purposefully made sure that it continued onto the right side in order to tie these two pages together a bit more.

Now we’re getting into the finishing touches of the spread! I finished up my figure by giving them a shirt made out of a piece of collage paper, adding some shading to the face, and outlining the entire thing with white pen. I then added a handful of silver star stickers across both pages, and repeated the same process of stamping with Nathalie’s Row Houses Foam Stamp and adding yellow Posca pen along the bottom of the right hand side of the spread. 

As a last detail, I added a quote along the edge of the figure’s hair that I felt was fitting. I decided not to outline the entire quote in white, but instead left that for the parts of the quote that were over darker parts of the page, where it was harder to read what was written.

And with that, we have my finished project for August! I’m quite happy with the way this month’s spread turned out and I definitely think I will be using these stamps again in the future to create skylines in my journals! I can already imagine it in neon! I hope you enjoyed following the process of this journal spread and that you are inspired to try something similar in your own journals!

Thank you Jordan – love how the skyline glows with those yellow details!

Give it a try: you can find all my Foam Stamps in my Online Shop and in addition to some collage elements, here are some of the supplies Jordan used:

Like what you see? Follow the Creative Squad on Instagram for weekly posts, artwork, and inspiration.

Did you miss yesterday’s Pattern Monday video in the email? Let’s try it again, here is yesterday’s video:

Nat