You don’t need to be an artist to Art Journal

Art Journalling means different things to different people. It can be a way of trying new art techniques associated with mixed media, a way of processing thoughts and feelings, a way to display a lot of visual ideas and so much more.

Coming into scrapbooking from photography and traditional paper scrapbooking, I associate any scrapbook layout that is photoless with some text on it to be an AJ or Art Journal page and nothing still scares me more than a blank canvas. I usually drag in photos or a template first because that’s just how I usually scrap. I’m more of an ‘accidental art journaller’, read on for a case in point.

I surprised myself this week by starting Month of Challenges (MOC) with a photoless AJ style page for Julie mrsa250’s Day 1 Element challenge, but that’s not what I started out with the intention of creating. Out of her choices of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, I knew I would scrap & write something about Earth, using the list of colours associated with it, and flicked through my photos and pulled out several actually that showed the greeny-blue mountainous landscape that is the backdrop to basically all my backyard photos, living in an area that’s between a mountain range and the coastline. So this challenge page became an accidental AJ layout. On reflection, maybe because I don’t think of myself as an artist and more a photographer, I never really set out to make AJ pages, but as with all my AJ pages, it took on a life of it’s own and I enjoyed the process and result.

So my main message today is we don’t need to be the original artist or even to consider ourselves as artistic to create art on a digital platform.

I think of digital Art Journalling as a bit like digital collage; pulling pieces together but definitely the watercolour and inky look lends itself easily to a more classic and painterly definition of art and no glue or mess required or sticky finger side-effects. Voila!

My influences for today’s page were definitely Rebecca McMeen’s watercolour illustration style and after seeing this designer challenge thread from Nov/Dec that I missed earlier, I was full of excitement about the Artistry Blends line by NBK Design. These were the first products I pulled out for the day 1 MOC challenge. And because I was thinking templates with photos and doing a more traditional page at first, I started with Scrapping With Liz’s Adventure Awaits mountain cut-out template too, then pulled in Lynn Grieveson’s So Much collection to give it a base and texture and tie it all together within the colour scheme of Earth. The scripty style parts to Lynn’s pre-mixed media’d background paper within the cut-out really added to the AJ feel to me and was a serendipitous timesaver!

How cool are these?! It doesn’t matter that I can’t draw or paint like these ladies or the other incredible designers in the store but they make me look good and help me express what’s in my head and heart, and that’s what this hobby is about, right? If you can drag and drop in a program that handles PNG files, you can be an artistic art journaller. There is a ton of info and inspo in the Art Journal Pad.

Hybrid art journalling is also a path some digi scrappers have ventured down. Having something to print and cut and then physically move around on a page in front of them before committing to gluing it down can take some of the trepidation away, you know, commitment issues can flow into artistic life as well. And also even if the thought of not having the Ctrl+Z Undo option available to you is a worry, the ability to print an image again (and again and again) and not have to start from scratch to create your art journal page is a great mental safety net. You can add real world ribbon and pieces like fabric and thread or keep to the printed pieces, there are no rules. Here are some examples including a hybrid Junk Journal, a type of Art Journal that makes use of a lot of paper layers of ephemera.

So if AJ or dabbling in a more photoless style is part of your new year goals and you need some extra info or inspo, the Hybrid Pad is full of useful info if you are new to printing and assemblage or have questions about the practicalities of how going from digi to paper works. Also, let me plug the Mix Media Beginners blog series I’ve posted previously, having already looked at stamps and paints and doodles/illustrations, there’ll be new posts coming soon. I’m still a beginner in my mind and building my confidence in this art form, but doesn’t self doubt exist within all artists?

Go forth and happily be creative!