I finished an art journal, yay. Usually my journals sit about 3/4’s of the way full and I don’t fill the last few pages. But I’m pretty proud of myself and feeling somewhat accomplished that I finished 2 in a row, cover to cover.
My goal with this most recent journal was to chronical my life in words and images. I think this journal does that. In most cases I have obliterated the words to make room for the imagery, but allowed some of the words to peeks through. I aimed to distill each days events down to a single spread in the journal. Every spread is a single days entry. Though I might say that I didn’t limit my activities on a spread to a single day, many of them I worked on for several days, and on weekends. Though the image may be about one single day or event I may have spent several days working on it.
Working 3×5 inches has challenges. I like to work small but some of my ideas I felt needed larger pages, alas I had a given size and I worked in it. I think it adds to some of the work that it’s forced to fit onto a small page, though on some pages I did allow myself to extend past the page borders.
The journal itself was a screw up, on I intended to sell on etsy but I fouled up the cover and made it about 1/8th inch too short, it made the journal disposable for me.It was in essence trash, so when I started to fill it’s pages I wasn’t nervous about screwing anything up. If anything now the short fore edge of the books adds to it’s charm, the fore edge of each page is exposed and make s the book look like it’s in a sweater that shrank. It looks far more abused than it ever was. I did take the book with me a few times but for the most part I left it at home on my easel, waiting for me to have a grand idea.
I worked in it heavily, thick impasto acrylics, layers of gesso and ink, sheets of paper glued in, pages from books, fold out pages, pockets and stuff glued to the pages, with acrylic and watersoluble crayons over the top of that. Each page was sealed with a 50/50 mix of bee’s wax and parafin. IT adds a nice glow tot eh pages and seals the acrylic from sticking to the other page. With out the wax, my journal would be one group of glued together pages.
Some photos:
