Journaling In the Sun

For about a month now, I’ve been conducting a kind of art journaling “experiment,” participating in Natalie Malik’s In the Sun e-course. Natty provides topic and technique prompts each week day, along with inspiring summertime photos and links to participants’ blogs on the weekend.

It is an experiment for me, because I have never tried to follow other people’s prompts for my art journal. (I make it sound like I’ve been art journaling forever, but I’ve really only been doing it since February of this year!)

I’ve also been trying to keep my style more consistent across entries, which has made it easier to complete an entire page in a single sitting. I rely heavily on magazine and catalog images. While I do not alter them, I make choices to combine them with papers, tapes, text, and other elements to create a page that responds to the daily prompt.

Without a doubt, I am enjoying this experience, and plan to see it through over the course of the summer. As expected, though, I feel more constrained by responding to prompts. I wouldn’t spend so much time on topics related to summertime if I were left up to my own devices.

Having said that, it’s also kind of fun to take a general topic (like “summer”) and really turn it around and around to look at it from all possible angles.

It becomes a kind of discipline to keep up with the daily prompts (though, to be honest, I have not made pages for six of the prompts, though I have made two “unprompted” pages). The part that has been most fun for me has been to search through my collection of images to find something appropriate for the day’s page, and to look through every new magazine and catalog that arrives in the mail for pictures that might work on some future page.

By far, the greatest benefit I have gotten from this eCourse has been my introduction to Flickr. When I first began signing up for Julie Balzer’s Art Journal Every Day, I would post my journal pages weekly here on my blog, but I never opened a Flickr account to share them in that forum. I didn’t see “the point.” I enjoyed looking at people’s journal pages in the context of their blog posts, so I had no interest “flipping through” their photostreams.

Now that I’ve signed up and posted for In the Sun, I totally “get it”! It is one more dimension to this beautiful sense of community I have discovered since I started blogging, art journaling, and sharing this year.

One of the strangest things for me has been the way I have separated in my mind my commitment to Art Journal Every Day from my commitment to In the Sun. When I create a page for Natty’s course, it’s like I feel it doesn’t “count” towards my commitment to Julie’s challenge.

Intellectually I understand that is not the case; I’ve seen people who post one page to four or five different groups they belong to on Flickr. But many of us have delved into the weird and wacky (and totally unnecessary) rules we create for ourselves, and this is one that I am currently trying to get out from under. I have been very happy to maintain my daily art journaling habit and discipline by being a part of Natalie’s class!

You can see the first post I wrote about the In the Sun class here.

Happy Friday to you!