One of my favorite hobbies is Art Journaling. I have been keeping journals for 50 years and have over a hundred of them. Some of them are store bought books, some are home-made Most recently, I have been making small ArtJournals that combine scrapbooking and diary keeping. It occurred to me this morning it might be helpful to post tips and strategies for that practice here on my blog.
At the end of this month, I will be teaching Art Journaling at Main Street Art in Maple Shade, but you can do it on your own. Sometimes easy things are difficult if you have never done them but if you want to give it a try, it might be easier to buy your first journal. I like spiral bound art sketch books which I buy at A.C.Moore in Deptford, usually for $5 each on sale. The Sunday Courier Post as coupons for A. C. Moore.
Themes: There are as many themes as there are people, but to start, if you like a prompt, I would go with Five Gratitudes. Recently I watched a documentary on amazon prime tv about happiness. For the past few years, psychologists and brain researchers have been studying healthy minds, not only unstable ones. Two things you can do to actually improve the health of your brain (scientifically proven via scanning) are to get exercise and practice meditating on the five things you have to be grateful for. Needless to say, meditation itself is healthful for your brain, too.
Other themes can be a memory, holidays, family, travels, events (for example, I did a page in one of mine on the solar eclipse!) and even an autobiography. Family history is a good one.
Resources: One of my most frequently used resources is photographs. I have dozens of albums of photographs and have been taking pictures since I was a twelve year old and got my first box brownie. I take pictures of EVERYTHING! A favorite subject is the park where I walk every day and that would be an excellent theme for an Art Journal - observations on what you see when you walk, the changing seasons, and photos of beautiful trees, scenes.
I print out my photos on my home printer, or I take photos to a copy center and get them color printed. I recently did some at Staples and if you did it yourself (very easy) it was 49 cents a page. Usually I go to Belia Copy Center in Woodbury, but they were closed the day I went.
You can also use maps, brochures, images from newspapers, magazines, catalogues and postcards. For example, if you did an Artist's Journal on your hobby of gardening, you might want to use seed packets, catalogue pictures, and prints of your photos. Also, I save ribbon, string, labels, and I buy stickers, stamps and ink.
For holidays, greeting cards are also useful.
I buy glue sticks at the dollar store, and I often use colored markers, colored pencils, and scrapbooking materials such as sheets of attractive page paper. Walmart often has good buys on stickers - sometimes $1 a page. You can buy attractive stick on trims too.
Four years ago, I took up scrapbooking to make a 30th birthday scrapbook for my daughter, and a 50th birthday scrapbook for my sister. Then I made a 70th birthday scrapbook for myself. It was fun and I have so many supplies left over that I use them in Art Journaling, which is definitely a cross over skill and practice.
Just now, I am working on a couple of Art Journals, one for Halloween. My daughter loved Halloween so much when she was little. And she had a wide context for her costumes, for example, she loved Jurassic Park so much, that I bought her a Velociraptor costume one year. A page will feature the graphics from the movie, printed on my color printer off the internet, and photos of her in her Velociraptor costume. Also, I have several items for Start Wars, which she loved, and went one year as Princess Leia. I have a column cut from a magazine about the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, the movie, this year, 2017. I think you get the idea.
The other Art Journal I am working on is Five Gratitudes, and a page on gratitude for my little bungalow home prompted me to do a book on the history of my time in this house. I took pictures of the house from the first day I saw it for sale, and I have photos from all the seasons, and the holidays here. The book I made has a simple house shape.
That reminds me of another theme - you could do one on foods your family favors, recipe's from your mother or father, and special holiday foods and the memories they bring back.
I hope this gets you started and here is my e-mail if you want to contact me about this or keep in touch about your progress:
wrightj45@yahoo.com
Also, how could I forget - if you are a history buff, and if you are a volunteer at a historic site, what a great subject for your ArtJournal!
Happy Trails
Jo Ann
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