3. Cultivate

Showing Up#gmseasonofshowingupThis season's artwork is created by Messian of the Year 2020, @stumblingoverchaos Dear Messy Artist Step one to being an artist is showing up....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.