tuesday tip: Learn about Art Journaling!

Do you keep a journal or diary? How about a visual diary or altered journal? Art journaling is an art form that incorporates writing, drawing, painting, collage, and scrapbooking within a bound book of some type. It is a way of expressing yourself freely and experimenting with different techniques. You can find some amazing examples of art journaling on Pinterest and Flickr.

User spinjenny (whose journal pages are seen above) describes visual journaling like this:

Looking at other people’s pages shows what a wide range of journals people keep. For some people, it is a diary, a notebook, a record of their experiments, a resource for later reference, or somewhere to let out their deepest feelings. Some are really sketchbooks with a few more words than usual. Some are mainly words with some decoration – painted backgrounds, doodles, cartoons or more realistic sketches. Some are multi-layered mixed media art. Anything goes! There are no rights or wrongs in journalling, just what works best for you. I’m still in the experimenting stage – looking at a lot of other people’s work, and trying out styles and materials.

The topic of art journaling was recently brought up in the Swap-bot forums by mrsdutton and many helpful users responded with some great tips and links. Check out a few of them to learn more about art journaling and be inspired!

Blogs:

• Artists Journal Workshop – A varied group blog for contributors to the book of the same name.
• The Sketchbook Challenge – Another group blog, with a monthly theme challenge, but very informative even if you don’t want to do the challenge.
• Green Isles Crafts – Lots of prompts along with descriptions of how she made her own pages, sometimes with videos too.
• Journal Artista – Paula has a lot of videos on YouTube and Ustream.
• Roz Wound Up – Roz is a workshop tutor.
• Diana Trout – Diana wrote Journal Spilling, an intro to art journalling.
• Fearless Art Journaling Series – on Handmade by Jessica (aka bluemonkeymama).
• D’Blogala – This is Dawn DeVries Sokol’s blog. She’s the author of 1000 Artist Journal Pages, which is a great book for inspiration!
• Journal Girl – Samantha Kira Harding’s blog shows her pages, some of her process and other tidbits.
• Journal Junk – Another blog with lots of photos and some video.

Workshops:

• Glimmerllama recommends the Strathmore Visual Journal Online Workshop – There are written instructions, video lessons, and discussion boards where people share their journals. She found that Workshop 3 was the easiest to start with.

Books:

• 1,000 Artist Journal Pages: Personal Pages and Inspirations
• Journal Spilling

• The True and the Questions: A Journal</a> by Sabrina Ward Harrison</li>

  • The Art Journal Workshop: Break Through, Explore, and Make it Your Own
  • Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith
  • Art Journaling magazine by Stampington & Co. has lots of beautiful photos, ideas, tip and tricks.</ul>

  Swap-bot users swap completed journals, shared group journals (in round robin journal swaps, the journals travel and each person works on a few pages), and loose journal pages. Search the “Journals” category to find all the current journal swaps. Here are a few swaps that are currently open for sign up:

  • The Shared Journal Experiment #5 – sign up by June 16th
  • Get Started Junque Journal – sign up by June 17th
  • Visual Journal Swap – sign up by December 31st

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  So, what do you think? Are you inspired to start your own art journal?

  (Thanks to spinjenny and bluemonkeymama for most of the links! If you have more art journaling links, please add them in the comments.)