Carol's Humble Art Journaling 101: What Is An Art Journal Anyways?

 

 

 

Art Journaling is not a diary.  It is a place to express your feelings, desires, your daily life, with marks, with writing, with any kind of coloring tools, with collage, and there are no rules.  You simply begin and starting adding things until you feel done.  A blank page is a brand new beginning and every emotion can show up as you get page by page done.  NO RULES!

Somewhere, we need release of our joys, our sorrows, our angers, our love, our passion, our everything to do with the heart of the matters.  We can mix and match paints, pens, cut-outs, and bits and pieces that allow you to experiment and explore what your heart says to do. 

There are all kinds of art journal ideas online, through google, through Pinterest, through just opening up your creativity, once and for all, and having your say in page after page of what is beautiful to you.  It can be shared or not shared.  It is a safe place to just simply express yourself, perhaps, in a new way.

You can use words, images, and color.  You can use any pens, pencils, paper, junk mail, printed text, writing, pretty papers, bits and pieces of found images.  You can use bits of maps, parts of old cards, tags, tickets, napkins, lace, material.  You can draw, doodle, paint, stamp, sketch, or paint with any painting tools you have from kid’s watercolors to acrylics.  You can choose a topic or not choose a topic for each page.  You can glue extra notes on to a page.  You can use journals you buy.  You can make your own.  You can use and repurpose an old book ( note:  spiral books are best so you can take out a page that you do not like without destroying things).  You can use composition notebooks, you can use folded watercolor or mixed media paper.  You can learn to make your own journals.  You can use stickers and tiny bows, and anything you can find at a dollar store.  You can use paper doilies.  You can use anything as a ‘substrate’ (the surface paper to paint or work on).  You can use tapes of every kind.  You can add photographs.  You can print out papers and pictures, words and ephemera you find online as long as they are free.  You can make an art journal out of index cards you punch holes in and use 0 rings to hold together. 

You can do some art journaling every day, or on weekends, or here and there.  You can do topics or not do topics.  You can do it monthly.  You can do it in a day planner.  You can overlap ideas and kinds of art you do in a journal.  Anything goes.  I love to use the Walmart black spiraled sketch books and I glue in whole sheets of watercolor paper or mixed media paper, sometimes.  I cut things out of magazines.  I add poems I like.  I used mine a lot for experimentation of art projects or art ideas.  You can draw designs, you can draw faces, you can draw landscapes, you can draw flowers… anything goes.  You can used mix media which means you can use anything that strokes your fancy at the moment.  I will be adding ideas all month so you will progress more and more and learn to love art journaling as expression. 

April is going to be a fabulous month for those who you who finally jump in and start expressing that which might even be inexpressible any other way.  Heaven and earth are the possibilities.   No rules. Grab a sketch book, a kid's story book, any book you can transform into your Art Journal.  Yes, you can buy expensive one, but for a first try, try not to use a book that is too precious.  We are going to learn to make merry messes. 

©Carol Desjarlais 4.1.21