Some cool little pictures from littleblackbooks on flickr, head over to their stream to see a lot more of their work.
Even if all you do is go through your journal and randomly color pages, or doodle borders or even just scribble do something related to art every day. It can take 5 to 10 minutes but you should do something everyday. It's part of the process. Process is the most important part of art journaling. Once art journaling is part of your everyday habit you won't want to leave it behind.
Everybody wants to sell you something. You need 3 things to art journal:
It's that simple. You don't need every product ever made, though they are fun. Some of the most beautiful journals I"ve seen are black and white or made with a ink and one other media. If you like color all you need is something simple, marker,watercolor, crayons, you name it and you can add color. You don't neede every rubber stamp, ink pad, re-inker, paint or marker ever made. Pick a few and go with them.
There are free tutorials online. There is nothing wrong with paying for a tutorial, hell classes are fun. But you don't need to know how to make a page just like someone else to make a great journal. All you need is you, a journal and something to make marks with. Anything else is optional.
That's right your pages don't need to be pretty. They can be ugly. You can leave them raw and "unfinished." Your pages can be:
Dirty
Dark
Ugly
Nasty
Angry
Black
White
Plain
The finished page will be beautiful in some manner. If you don't like it you can always go back to it, reuse it, gesso over it, collage it into another page, glue the pages together and further manipulate the page.
Make it yours but don't hold it to anyone else's standard of beauty. Don't compare your pages to other people's pages. They are yours.
This weekend I'm talking about just paint on a page, sandpaper, and watercolor crayons. 3 super easy starts for an art journal.
First paint on a page. It's just that- liquid acrylic on a page. You can use any brand that you want, Making Memories, Golden, Liquitex, or CrApple Barrel. The all work. The essence is that you squirt the paint directly on the page. You can then move the paint around in any manner you want. You can work with more than one color at a time too. No rules.
The next thing I like to do is sandpaper pages. In this example. I've taken a page II"ve done the following to: layer 1 gesso Layer 2 liquid acrylic Layer 3 watercolor crayons and water I've let all that dry over night then I've taken a very fine sanding sponge and I've sanded the page. It give the page a weathered "shabby" look (shoot me now for using that word) BUT the page itself is glass smooth. the key to this look is to put on a rough textured layer of gesso. You could actually write on this apge with a fountain pen. I"m using a fine 3m sanding sponge that I've cut into a thin strip. You can also using a sanding block in fine. You can get these in the house goods section of any dollar store or at big box store like Home Cheapo.
Another thing I like to do is to add a layer of watercolor crayons in a large amount over a page with gesso and acrylic on it. I then use a rag to wipe off some of the color. This can give a great distressed and vintage appearance. It's great to do with a collage piece too.
Next time: MY favorite gesso and sharpie
An art journal should be a safe place to explore feelings, ideas, art techniques, educations, your belly button and everything else in your life. In your art journal you should be free and feel free to do that. If you are focusing on the end product you lose the point of keeping an art journal and that is to explore all thatI listed above. What the page looks like at the end doesn't matter as much as getting it to that point and HOW you got to that point. Don't approach the page thinking of how it's going to look at the end. Start working on the page without thought.
Write.
Draw.
Paint.
Scribble.
Scrub.
Glue.
Do What feels right.
Do what feels wrong.
Try new things in your art journal. No one else needs to see it, unless you want them to. Be happy. Be sad. Angry. Melancholic. drunk. Introspective. Think about yourself. Your family. The world. Politics. Mass Media. Hysteria. Your friends. People you don't know. Think it out. Write it down. Draw it. Paint it. Doodle. Scribble. Wax. INk Stamp Charcoal. Scrub. Brush. Sand Emboss.
Try things.
So I've been online alot looking for blogs to link to, art on flickr to post here and watching videos on youtube. In this journey I've been bombarded with adverts for products, workshops, classes, etsy shops, how-to instruction and I've seen an overwhelming number of comments on blogs, youtube and flickr asking a simple question "How do I do this?" What was most concerning to me, other than the startling amount of consumerism that has moved into the art journaling blog-o-sphere and internet were the amount of tutorials on how to build up an image "just like so-and-so's" and also a lot of questions on those same blogs about how to do just that.
From my concern and frustrations I"ve come up with:
The Comfortable Shoes Studio 7 Rules of art Journaling.(TM)
They are as follows:
I will over the next few days expound on each of these ideas in a full post. But this is borne of the idea that art journaling should be from inside, art journaling should be free and loose and about exploration. Technique can be taught but the end result should not be. When I was a budding art teacher my mentoring teacher told me that my duty was to shape and mold the kids to make their own art and that I should teach process and method but never the end. I take that idea to the art journals- i can teach people how to make them, how to fill them but I'm not going to tell anyone what to fill them with.
I love looking at a video of somone paging through their journal, it’s a great way to view them.
I’m pretty much in love with this moleskine: