Seriously, everywhere. Look at your morning coffee, your egg mcmuffin, the trash on the ground, dirty dishes, your pen/pencil/brush, your hand, alarm clock, lamp,air conditioner, car/truck, train, train pass, dollar bill, debit card, credit card, the internet, the TV, cat, ferret, dog, a tree,a park, a movie, your family, homeless dude sitting next to you on the bus, the newspaper,a magazine, office, your job, your home, birth control or lack of it, your best friend, your most hated enemy, your ex, a funny website, youtube, your mom, air filters, dust, dust bunnies, a spider, a mouse, the vacuum an etc…

In short anything can inspire you to write/draw/paint in your art journal. Where do you let it take you? That's what matters.

What speaks to you? Crfayons? If so use them. Do you only like to write in blue, purple or green? That's okay too.

Do you like:

Sharpies?
Caran d'ache?
Charcoal?
Acrylic?
Watercolors?
Colored Pencils?
Collage?
Gouache?
Ink?
Rubber stamps?
Pastel?
Watercolor Pencils?

If so use them.

Do you hate any of the above? Then don't use it.

Do you like to use more than one? Use whatever you like. Mix 'em up.

Use what you like there is no one (but you) to stop you!

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:

1. Yourself.
2. A journal.
3. Something to write/draw/paint with.

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.

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:

1. Process NOT results
2. Pages don't have to be pretty.
3. Be wary of sales pitches. (but don't begrudge.)
4. Do a little everyday.
5. Any media/medium is okay.
6. Look for inspiration everywhere.
7. Rules should be broken.

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.