Like A Black Crow Flying In A Blue Blue Sky

I decided to work on this one because of the journal jam that I had just completed because it was about crows!

Before creating the journal page, we did some sketching of crows to test out what supplies we felt like using.  I found a selection of black pens and pencils and did some quick sketching.

I wasn’t required to do this many but I had divided my paper into 12 squares and managed to find 12 different black things to scribble with so why not!   My favourites were the top right, though I actually used the wrong pencil.  You can see the little black swatch next to it, that is the pencil I meant to pick up.  It’s much blacker.  I also like the dip pen and ink which is on the left, second row from the bottom, and I quite like how black the Tombow brush pen is which is in the middle of the second row from the top.

As this is a class lesson there are no step by step photos but I do want to share some of these close ups of ink doing its thing as they just looked cool on the page before they got covered up.


Part of my fascination with watercolour is watching the paint move in the water, and watching this was just as fascinating, even though it’s acrylic ink in water.  I’d be happy to just have that on a page and call it done lol.

This is a crow inspired page so I had to draw a crow obviously after I had finished working on my background.  I choose this deep turquoise as my accent colour and I used the black pencil and then dip pen with ink to make my crow.  While I was doing that I was thinking about a song by Joni Mitchell called Black Crow Flying in a Blue Sky, and so I used some words from that song in my background (not part of the lesson)

After I wrote on my title (song lyrics) I had the idea to use the dip pen to make my letters all scratchy like if the crow had written them with his claws/talons. FYI don’t do this as you will ruin your nib.  I am using an old nib so it doesn’t matter so much but dip pens like nice smooth paper (bristol is good), they do not like cold pressed watercolour paper covered in mixed media lol and they are very sharp, so they can/do leave holes in paper!  Still it was worth it lol

I am thinking I might attach my crow sketches as a flip out page.

I added black and silver splatters (not part of the lesson) because I like splatters!

I did the same scratchy dip pen thing around the edges with silver ink to frame the page.

And that’s the finished page.   If you want to see the class version you can see it in the first photo in a blog post here.

Let me know what you think in the comments and as always, thanks for reading!