Sunday, November 11, 2012

Art Journaling: My Way

I would love to do "proper" art journaling with lots of layers of paint & ink & collage elements... The problem is- my paper can't take it!

Now, I do have a fair amount of paper stashed away. But I didn't start playing with paints or wet media until this year so most of my paper is colourful notebook paper (which I LOVE!) and cheap scrapbook paper.  This type of paper buckles badly & will pretty much disintegrate with too much paint. I don't have the funds for gesso or anything to treat my paper so I have taken to doing this:

  
mini art journaling "pages"



 I do my little art journal "pages" on small scraps of paper or blank ATCs & glue them into my book.

This eliminates a lot of barriers for me.

1) It doesn't matter if the paper buckles or the paint seeps thru- because it's just going to be glued down anyway!

2) I use less paint & ink, which means I don't use up my supplies too quickly

3) My notebooks don't get filled up faster than I want (I generally like my journals to last me 6 months- 1 year)

3) I've found that I prefer to make smaller paintings & drawings rather than larger ones.  It keeps me from getting overly fussy about details & making it perfect. Full page spreads for every idea would be too much.

4) I can work on my journal even when I don't have it with me

Prepped backgrounds


I have a bunch of pre-cut cards that are stashed in my journal pocket, purse, wallet & a couple other convenient places. Most of them are blank but I do sometimes prep the background ahead of time, like the ones above. I also use scraps or scratch paper & cut them down later.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw this out there into cyber space.  Maybe somebody else will find it helpful :)


2 comments:

  1. Try to keep your brush as dry as possible when painting, that should help to keep your pages from buckling. I only ever use gesso if I want to obliterate something completely on the page. Hope that helps! :)

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