“To make time for art, you have to believe
that it's possible to make time for art.”
― Creative Wildfire: An Introduction to Art
Journaling - Basics and Beyond
Start, right now, gathering up some art supplies that you may even have around the house. Use old photo albums, use envelopes, use boxes or bins, but tart looking at paper products in a new way. You will find tons of paper products that have color, words, images, things you can tear, things you can use for collage, things you can remake into something you can use in your art journal.
1. Choose a theme for your journal. It does not mean you have to stay with that theme, but it gives you another stimuli for each blank page you will meet. Right now, I am working in five different themed journals. At some point you will find another journal, make another journal, seeing books as another source of your Art Journaling adventure.
2. Get some Gesso from Walmart or somewhere cheap (sometimes dollar stores are your best friend). Gesso up a few pages and get them dry so you can start right in.
3. Get some kids’ craft paints and watercolors because, to begin with, anything absolutely goes and you are experimenting. Grab a couple of sharpies with different nib sizes. Use your kids’ felt pens. Of course, you can use gel pens and any kind of markers.
4. Start keeping some old magazines and newsprint, maps, bits and pieces of shapes and colors and cut out some objects to have handy. Save ticket stubs, menus, napkins, receipts, labels, stamps, advertisements, ribbon anything goes.
5. Grab some Mod Podge, and glue sticks, and any glue but school glue (because it is not waterproof and will come unstuck).
6. Get a small box of Charcoal pencils at WalMart or your Dollar Store.
7. Later you will find you want to try spray inks, India inks, stamps, stencils and the like. I even use spackle for dry walls and you can get awesome texture and lots of pages use out of a small container.
8. Grab some old credit cards or the plastic cards you do not have use for. They work magic for smoothing out gesso and pages and things you stick on a page, like collage bits and pieces.
9. Grab a small spray bottle for spraying water and a piece of toweling or some kind of rag. Scott Toweling is not only a brush cleaner, a water-mopper-upper, it can also be used for printing.
10. Hit up thrift stores for ribbons, and bits of jewelry pieces, bits of papers.
11. Never pass up the place mats from restaurants, tickets, old cards, old magazines. Your eye will begin to watch for bright splotches of color on things. Get an old shoe box, etc., to keep your bits and pieces in. I use an old binder with plastic pocket sheets. After all, art journalists are hoarders of all bits and baubles so try to keep things organized to some degree because this can become a magnificent obsession.
Remember, anything you can stick down, stitch on, clip glue staple glue gun, or attach is free game.
This journal entry is simply watercolor and let dry and then use a fine nibbed black pen to go around the blocks and shapes of colors that happen to turn out. It is done wet on wet, which means I gesso’d the page, let it dry and then sprayed some water on the page and dropped water color blobs and let it run. I let it dry well. Then I drew around the shapes I found. Happens, I can do journaling right in the center circle. The trick is to just let it happen... intuitive art is fabulous for a starting place on a blank page.
Oh, by the way, Do not ever be shy to take a photo of your page(s) and share them in our private group. Everyone is at their own level. Everyone has a soul that needs expression. We share not to get accolades (which will happen, anyways) since we are artists and we need inspiration all the time like a sugar addict needs sugar.
Happy Gathering!
©Carol Desjarlais 4.2.21
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