Get Messy

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Get Messy begins and ends with you. It’s the community of people with a common goal of expressing themselves through art journaling that makes Get Messy unique. For the Season of Finishing, guest artist, Lynissa Hayes show you how to bind an easy envelope pocket journal that adapts to your workflow and is never unfinished. You’ll learn how to finish art journal spreads with the unfinished, and how to collate these unfinished bits and search for inspiration and edging closer to the end results. And then! Oh beautiful Messy Artist, it’s time to include yourself in your journal. Your beautiful, unfinished self. Because in the end, all our journals are is: who we are.

Get Messy encourages you to take your artistic spark and focus it into a regular practice that expresses who you are. For the Season of Focus, guest artist Maria Zaida shows you how she overcame her art journaling intimidation through an intuitive approach to building a layered spread from start to finish in a handmade journal. Learn how to incorporate your favourite elements in an art journal spread as Maria takes you through a step by step process for creating a spread that merges together her love of florals and black and white designs.

Part of Get Messy’s job is to help cultivate the magic in you. For the Season of Spark, we’re going to harness your magic, turn it into a little spark, and allow it to burst into flames. Guest artist Katrina (or Mercurial Milk as she is known on Instagram) shows you how to create a ‘scene’ or a full painting spanning two pages or a spread in your art journal. She then shares her magic with you so that you can spark your own art journaling magic.

Join the kookiest Get Messy season yet – the Season of Steven where guest artist and Get Messy founder Caylee shows you how to transform inspiration into action. Using the words of writer Steven Pressfield, Caylee shows you how to fill an entire art journal. Follow along by choosing your own “Steven,” then selecting, prepping, and processing an altered book. Fill it up with inspiring quotes and words with Caylee’s lettering tips and tricks, including “imperfect brush lettering,” stencils and script, typewriter fonts, stamping, alpha stickers (even when you run out of those important vowels), and more.

The Season of Bloom invites you to let go of ideas of perfection and deconstruct conceptions of beauty. Our wonderful guest for the season is Francisca Nunes of heArt makes who combines colour and nature to explore intuitive expression. For this season, you will create a Bloom Book that is testimony to the passage of time. Learn how to boil paper to create texture and play with colours, shades, and lines to create paper that you will use as collage elements inside your Bloom Book.

Get Messy is made up of YOU. You are what makes Get Messy, and this season is all about your personal art journey. What is X? It’s the independent variable, the Great Unknown, the thing that you need to find. The Season of X invites you to find your very own X. We reverse engineered the seasons, threw structure out of the window, and leaned on each other to build a season that reflected our imperfect, messy community. Download and follow along with the Sidekick and follow along to find your X.

A natural partner to the Season of More is the Season of Less. There is space for both of these seasons in our lives, whether we are art minimalists or art maximalists. Guest artist, Barbara J. Graham, is a full time abstract expressionist painter who draws inspiration from the joy of the present moment. With Graham as your guide, you will learn how to use colour and mark making to convey emotion and create massive impact with minimal resources. Explore the full possible range of a limited colour palette and experiment with mark making. Then learn how to pull it all together in your art journal.

Lauren Hooper returns for the Season of More. With Lauren as your guide, you will identify what you need more of in your life and create artful reminders that encourage you to keep seeking what you need more of. Lauren also shows you how to create depth in your art journal pages with layered watercolours. Whether you want to explore art maximalism or more in your life in a broader sense, the Season of More gives you the space to do so.

Season guest artist Connie Solera embraces showing up to your art journal with honesty, vulnerability, and fearlessness in the Season of Affirmation. Through intuitive painting, Connie helps you embrace every mark you make as a part of a conversation and to follow the first ideas, gut reactions, and little whispers that won’t leave you alone. Hold your art journals close to your heart as a safe sanctuary to affirm all the feels you are feeling, all the fears you are experiencing, and all the hope you can muster for a brighter future ahead.

Part of belonging to this incredible community is that we are seen. Not just the bits of ourselves that we curate for social media, but our true authentic selves. There is a shared vulnerability that is respected among Messians, which is why for the Season of Truth, we encourage you to explore your truth, speak your truth, and be vulnerable in your journal. Guest artist Johanna Clough walks you through five simple things to strive to include in your journal pages to ensure you are filling them with meaning, purpose, storytelling, and emotion.

Get Messy has art, tutorials, and a crazy amount of inspiration all wrapped in love and community. At each part of Get Messy is the opportunity to make a friend, to be a friend, to be kind, and to receive kindness. In the Season of Belonging, Mou Saha explores the internal need for true belonging. Along with a host of creative prompts and catalysts to kickstart your creating, you can join Mou’s workshops on monoprinting and lettering. Mou guides you through her process for creating a monoprinted page. Then, you’ll turn your monoprinted pages into lettering with Mou’s signature messy technique.

The Season of Home features guest artist Char Derouin who will help you explore your feelings of belonging, heritage, and home through junk journaling. Char walks you through her process for making junk journals, including how she gathers and prepares supplies for creating. She also shows you how to make staggered junk journals and paper bag junk journals. So settle in and get comfortable and explore what home means to you.

This season, a host of incredible artists take you on a creative journey focused on what Get Messy believes is the most important part of being an artist: habit. These artists show you how they fit an art habit into their full, rich lives. Learn creative warm-up exercises to get you started, how to build a 20 minute art break into your schedule, how to keep a digital art idea notebook, and how to utilize the Get Messy hangouts and community towards your art habit. This season shows you exactly how, in very actionable steps, to make a creative habit as second nature as brushing your teeth.

The Season of Documentation is about showing exactly who you are via art journaling. In this season, you will use an old book and six artists will show you how to document yourself in your art journal. Challenge yourself to include self-portraits and images in your art journal with numerous prompts and tutorials. Learn how to document the colours of your life and the wide range of feelings you experience. See how to collect inspiration from a daily journaling practice and introduce yourself to junk journaling.

For the Season of Starting, we have 3.5 incredible artists who share their unique experiences of starting art at four very different points. Includes four weeks of tutorials, prompts, and actionable inspiration that will be the catalysts on your art journey. Learn how to bind a vintage book into a handbound journal, as well as several other bookbinding methods for truly unique handbound journals. Explore intuitive painting, ideas and lessons from other artists for creating your own style, practical ways for getting back into journaling after a break, and how to face your fear and take the leap.

For the Season of Inspiration, host Lauren Hooper helps you determine who or what your muse is and how to use your muse in your artwork and push yourself further. Additionally, four other artists share their muses with you, how they found them, why they can’t stop creating with them, and how they have evolved them over time. If you are ready to take your art to the next level, infuse it with meaning, have your name be synonymous with your muse, and find a love that will last your art a lifetime – this season is perfect for you.

If perfectionism is what’s stopping you from making art that you love, then join the Season of Failure. Hosted by Get Messy Fairy Artmother, Caylee Grey takes you through a 5 step process to “eff comparison,” dance naked in perfection’s face, and make sweet, sweet (imperfect) art in your art journal. Learn to embrace failure with a failure tracker and even a failure bingo. Transform imposter syndrome into a trickster goddess with Emily Mulrony, and don’t miss Brandi Kincaid’s tutorial on using commonplace books as weapons against perfectionism.

For the Season of Creativity, we show you how to translate the things you love into beautiful and unique art journal pages. Learn how to find, translate and create art from inspiration in the world around you. Then create an entire art journal using something you already love that is deeply personal and fun: media. Your favorite book, TV show or movie will be your jumping off point for creating artwork based off of your life and your interests. Hosted by Lauren Hooper, this season is here to help you see yourself as an artist, living a creative life.

The Season of Celebration celebrates the Get Messy community of artists who guide you through this season. They share tips for how to “sneak around” the fear of imperfection and make yourself accountable to a daily art practice, as well as using the Get Messy seasons to explore a particular theme and develop your own style. Tutorials include transforming your mood with art journaling, creating a “use it up” journal for leftover paints and paper bits, exploring shape and form to represent different emotions, releasing your inner child through fingerpainting, using found materials, and documenting your day.

For the Season of Reflection, we reflect on our magnificent art journey and celebrate our growth. Caylee walks you through making life mind maps to create tangible action plans for all your glorious ideas. Learn how to create a Japanese Ledger art journal and a shadow box that will fold down neatly into your journal. Follow along the five journaling paths leading toward improved: emotional well-being, creativity, productivity, physical health, and mindfulness. Then learn how to combine written journaling and art to create meaningful and cohesive pages.

The Season of Freedom is for uninhibited creating, journaling without restraint, embracing the mess in art and life, venturing into the unknown, expressing yourself, letting go of fear and doubt, and release. Prompts, tutorials, interviews, and challenges await you as you tackle the idea of what freedom means to you in your life and in your art. Go bold with hand lettering, try out collography, paint ethereal watercolour butterflies, use acrylic mediums to build layers, practice painting fast and slow, and more. Guest Artist, Ali Brown, shows you how to liberate yourself with abstract painting and joy notes. Let your art reflect your truest self and desires.

At Get Messy, you are not a number, but a vital part of our community. A South African word, Ubuntu means: I am because we are. This season delves deep into the humanity in all of us and how to illuminate and connect with it. Through tutorials about charcoal and gesso, alcohol ink, and brush lettering with watercolour and ink, you will explore social justice causes in your home and world and find ways that your art can elevate the good in all of humanity. Guest artist Kellee Wynne from Colour Crush Creative shows you how to create a mixed media concertina art journal and introduces you to colour theory.

The Season of Seasons explores the passing of time and how we change and grow with the seasons. Prompts help you express your evolution through your life’s seasons, and tutorials show you how to map your relationship to the earth’s seasons. Learn how to document your emotions with a lunar calendar and create a spinner to move through the seasons of life. Create seasonal mood boards, collages for each of the seasons, and leaf and flower gelli prints for all seasons. Guest artist Julia Marriott shows you acrylic painting and colour techniques to make your art bloom.

For the Season of Story, you will create art that represents your life, your family, your history, your dreams, your goals, and your past, present, and future. Learn unconventional ways to tell your story through abstract art, photographic abstraction, and comic book panels. Use vintage photos and found words to tell a familiar or fictional story about yourself and the hero’s journey as a template for your life journey. Guest Artist Amy Tan of Amy Tangerine shows you how to tell your story by combining memory keeping and art journaling. Come tell your story with us.

For the Season of Play, leave behind self doubt and judgement and dive headfirst into creative play. Make your own rotating stamps and use junk drawer items to make marks in your art journal. Revisit your childhood by creating paper dolls with movable parts and turning scribbles into bright, fun art journal pages. Play the roll the art dice game and go on a scavenger hunt in your neighborhood for art journal inspiration. Transform yourself into a superhero in your own comic. This season features a collaboration with Sketchbook Skool, Danny Gregory and Koosje Koene, who show you a zillion ways to fill a sketchbook.

Kindness defines the Get Messy Community. This season focuses on self love and love for others. Practice self-love by painting paper and collage, creating collaged hands of forgiveness, and writing an origami love letter to yourself. Incorporate yarn for pattern and texture and interactive flaps to reveal inspiration for ordinary kindness. Learn easy tricks for illustrating people and making your own mandalas and spread kindness in your communities in the form of tiny pieces of art. Guest artist Kiala Givehand shares a wealth of ideas for conquering the blank page and playful printmaking. Spread kindness in your communities in the form of tiny pieces of art.

The Season of Nature celebrates the wild and natural world. Connect with nature in your art journaling by making plant-based inks, creating a DIY flower press, using the language of flowers, including leaves, and block printing nature motifs. Learn artistic techniques from cave painting, how to create a journal representing the tides, and how to begin doodling. Guest Artist Lina shows you three techniques for creating watercolour backgrounds and how to translate music to paper.

The Season of Connections explores your connection to your art, your people, and your world. Make connections in your art journal by using thread and vintage elements to connect to your past, using continuous line drawing, finding hidden imagery in paint splatters, and gathering ephemera for meaningful collage. Other tutorials include creating a mixed media self-portrait, techniques for using ink in your art journal, and creating rituals and building habits for art journaling. Guest artist Brandi Kincaid shows you how to make a folded accordion book for everyday details.

The Season of Fairy Tales asks you to spread the magic of your art throughout the world. Begin by creating an accordion folded journal and a pop-up art journal to hold your art magic. Explore including interactive elements in your art journal and layering vellum and transparencies to produce soft layers. Challenge yourself by foraging for art journal supplies in unexpected places and making paint brushes from found objects. Learn techniques for creating woodland backgrounds, fantastic creatures, and your own printables. Guest artist Olivia shows you some brush letter inspiration and how to include it in your art journal.

The Season of Colour holds nothing back when it comes to colour, light, and brightness. You will learn what colour means to you, to your culture, what you can express with it, and how to use colour with more confidence. Challenge yourself by mixing your own colours, experimenting with unfamiliar colours, and journaling in monochrome. Create your own colour catalogue, paint with “bleeding” tissue paper, and create marbled paper with ink. Guest artist, Katie Licht, shows you how to find inspiration and unexpected colour palettes in the process of creating.

The Season of Contrast experiments with differences with guest artist, Amy Maricle. Through prompts and tutorials, we challenge you to think about what could be and to mix and match mediums, ideas, and techniques. Learn to create contrast by working with negative space, using scale, masking and resisting, combining contrasting media, combining warm and cool colours, and juxtaposing moods. Other lessons include painting faces, painting intuitively, repurposing pieces of old artwork, obscuring journaling with mixed media layers, using gelli plates to create faces, and weaving with paper.

The goal of the Season of Art 101 is to introduce you to new mediums and techniques and to eliminate the scary part of how to get started, what to choose, and how to care for supplies. The Messy Artists start at the very beginning with the best supplies and how to use and care for them. They then show you new techniques using these materials. This season also features guest artist Pam Garrison who teaches you how to produce detailed layers and shares insights into her regular art journal practice. Don’t miss the lesson on how to do collaborative art projects.

The Season of Gifts explores the idea of gifts, both intrinsic and external. Begin by learning how to make an upcycled journal from gift wrapping supplies. Essie shows you how to share art via mailable art journals and Nina creates art journal pages with “giving hands.” Learn how to use stencils in multiple ways, add metallic pops, and hide your journaling. Challenge yourself to make art journal pages without looking! Katie talks about working in multiple themed journals at once and Cait shares the power of a morning art ritual.

The Season of Dreams is where consciousness, subconsciousness, and our imaginations meet. Follow along with an illustrated dream journal using found papers. Explore the surreal world of double exposure photographs in your art journal and transforming dreamy watercolours into animals, botanicals, and more. Learn how shoe polish, tin foil, and glue can make distressed metallic elements. Create dreamy impact with vellum and water and ink. Learn how to use art galleries for actionable inspiration and see the Messy Artists’ beautifully honest tutorial on using art journaling to work through depression and anxiety.

The Season of Music combines two of the world’s greatest muses: Art and Music. Get started with how to draw a song, creating pages inspired by cover art, make 10 pages with 10 songs in 10 minutes, and including song lyrics in your art journal. Learn about colour theory and how to create portraits and galaxies with watercolours. Create distressed art journal pages with paper aging and burning. Get the most out of your Get Messy membership each season with an intention setting tutorial.

For the Season of Introspection, we turn inward to investigate our innermost thoughts and feelings. Begin with using ink blots to connect to your intuition and art journaling your personality type. Make a gorgeous mess bleaching paper, stenciling with mists, and making watercolour collage paper. Learn how to use the style of artists you admire. Find and source words for journaling and use your own photography. You will want to save that junk mail for the tutorial on using envelopes in your art journal. Don’t miss Katie’s beginner’s guide to drawing faces or Tanylee’s 10 minute art journal pages.

Featuring Get Messy’s first collaboration with 30 Days of Lists creators Amy Schubert and Kam Altar, the Season of Lists includes 30 lists and 30 art prompts. Learn to create lists in a variety of handmade journals with a pamphlet stitch, tag album, and tiny watercolour album. Create backgrounds with gelatos, watercolour effects, and texture. See how to transfer images with clear packing tape, collage with magazines, and find inspiration in everyday life. Don’t miss the Creative Team’s insights on “ugly pages.”

We all need a little more happy in our lives. Packed full of tutorials and ideas for happiness, the Season of Happy explores the emotions of colour with colour psychology and colour-based art pages. See how to make your art journal pages truly unique by creating your own stencils and making your own backgrounds with gelli plates. Learn how to incorporate photos in your art journal for unexpected results and vintage botanicals to create floral collages. Wrap up your art journal happiness with a tutorial on how to create an accordion journal.

The Season of Magic is about creating and finding magic in your art journal. Tutorials include mixing ink with acrylic paint for delightfully messy, magical results and incorporating words when you don’t like your own handwriting, as well as creating map self-portraits and making strip paper collages. See the art journaling mini challenge, Writing Letters to Your Past Self, for a printable notebook to spark your journaling.

The “journaling” part of art journaling is all about words, which is why in this season, we explore the power of words. We begin with showing you how to choose and prepare an altered book for art journaling. Then explore unique ways you can play with altered books using “peek through” pages, creating dynamic collages, and embracing your own handwriting via handlettered phrases and quotes. For this season, prioritize creating and put some words, any words onto a page.

The Season of Serenity invites you to explore how you understand the world around you and how that understanding can bring you peace. This season explores digital collage and using tissue paper and stamping to create delicately textured pages. We share a tutorial for how working with limited supplies can elevate what you make to completely new levels via a Get Messy swap (one of our favorite activities!). Our hope for you this season is that you find serenity between the pages of your art journal.

The Season of Adventure embraces wanderlust and exploration by exploring the uniquely expressive world of abstract art journaling and painting and includes how to make your own marbled papers with items you can find at your local grocer. Caylee includes a thoughtful tutorial on how sharing your art journal pages online can build community, hold you accountable to your own creative practice, and spark your creativity.

The Season of Brave is where the famous Zine Squad (Jules, Katie, and Vanessa) found their beginnings. This season challenges you to push past your artistic comfort zones and art journal your truths. Tutorials include how to create word art with washi tape and art journal with kids, as well as Get Messy’s first introduction to image transfers and mixed media techniques. Questions answered include: what is gesso and how do you know when a page is done?

The first official season of Get Messy, the Season of Love celebrates love in all its forms. Featuring a variety of artists and their unique perspectives, the Season of Love includes tutorials for playing with washi tape, incorporating everyday items like paper towels, creating your own embellishments, and using ephemera in your art journaling. You don’t want to miss the tutorial on how to get started creating with Get Messy prompts.