Years ago I began painting again after a 33 year hiatus by taking an online course with Flora Aube called The Art of Allowing. It introduced me to the process of intuitive painting and I took to it like a fish to water. Bypassing all of the academic skills I had learned in my undergraduate degree in art decades earlier, I was finally able to paint from the soul without censoring my creative instincts.

The one catch was that we were instructed to purchase artist quality paints and large, professional canvases, which were very expensive and fueled my fear of wasting these precious supplies. So although it liberated a new freedom of expression in me, I also quit painting once I had used up the materials and didn't have any idea what to do with the finished products. It is an entirely different endeavor to learn how to market and sell one's art as a business. So I began to seek ways to continue the process, which was so therapeutic for me, without the concern about materials and waste.

I was a papermaker and bookbinder for decades before I went into the healing arts, so I began to get curious about using paper rather than canvases. That is when Painting without a Plan was born, because I discovered that I could use inexpensive craft acrylic paints and a large pad of drawing paper to satisfy my urge for somatic painting and embodied creative expression on a larger scale without worrying about what wall they were going to hang on. This allowed me to be far more experimental and generous with my supplies, which was very freeing for me.

I then took a wonderful journal painting course with Connie Solera and wanted to use my prior skills to create my own journal. So I decided to use my large, painting pad that was filled up on both sides with process paintings. I discovered that I could tear down the ones I didn't want to keep anymore and bind them into a painted journal that I then used to paint, draw and write in (which is the next part of the series).

Since then I have offered local workshops called The Painted Journal and found that it was a very beneficial process for people to not only experience intuitive painting, but also to bind their own little book for the first time. Finally I decided it was time to share this with more people online and thus this 3 part course was born.