Adventures in Art Journaling

I uploaded photos from my camera today – and found a lot of pix of my journaling explorations!  Guess I should upload more often!

I started in a new sketchbook/journal with a plain black cover.  That just won’t do!  So I used a couple of stencils, some molding paste, an oil pastel stick, and voila!  I love it, but next time I won’t use molding paste on something that is moved around a lot.  I’m finding little white pastey things all over the place!

Here’s a couple of the pages I’ve done so far.  One thing I want to do this year is use my Silhouette Cameo more often.  I have been collecting TONS of shapes, but not doing very much with them.  So, I’m trying to cut at least one shape a week and do something with it.  I experimented with cutting some stamps (the ‘January’, ‘create’, arrow, and figure) with mixed results.  It seems to be better with large stamped areas.  I love the arrow stamp, though.  Definitely worth the hassle!

I decided I needed another, smaller, journal for an online class I’m taking.  For this one, I cut up a large “doodle” page for the cover and bound some watercolor paper and drawing paper as the pages.

It’s simple, but colorful!  Just the right size (9”x6”, give or take) and I keep it next to my easy chair, handy for the class exercises and other doodling.  A small bit of Velcro keeps it neatly closed.  What would we ever do without DeMestral’s invention?

And the first thing I did was doodle a mandala!  I used a box of crayons I picked up some time ago, but had never opened.  I love playing with new crayons!!  You can see I also made a list of 10 things that inspire me . . . still working on number 10!  It’ll come to me.

And that page I cut up for the cover?  There’s a lot left, so I cut some of it into ATC sizes.  Ready made backgrounds for when the Muse strikes.  And there’s still some of the page left for future projects.  Yes, it was a Large page!

So that’s one of the things I’ve been doing lately.  Maybe I’ll remember to take pictures of my other projects some day.  Oh yeah – and upload from the camera!