A Look Into My Art Journal

After finishing my first Art Journal Round Robin (AJRR) last year, I found myself with empty pages at the back of the book.  I didn't want to retire it to my art room shelves until those final spreads were complete! 

I decided to use that book for my regular art journaling this month.  Even though many, many months have passed since it's been used, I figure that lapse isn't going to look like much when I'm looking back over my art journals when I'm 81!

I sat down and collaged all four spreads in the same sitting.

I had a stack of images that I had clipped mainly from old issues of Somerset Studio.  I don't have enough shelf space to keep too many whole magazines, so I file articles I want to reference again, and add the pretty pictures to my collage fodder drawer.

That means, of course, that the beauty of these pages is due entirely to images that are not of my own creation!

But as many before me have noted, there is great therapy, and I would argue a degree of artistry involved in combining and arranging the images in new and meaningful ways.

I found again, as I have discovered before, that it helps to pull a stack of a large but limited number of pictures, rather than trying to rifle through my whole collection at the same time.

I pulled pictures that were "speaking to me" at that moment, and then as I started going through them, I began regrouping those that seemed to go together by color or theme or style.

From there, the spreads came together, and I went back in the days following the collage process to add some pen work and journaling.

There are still eight spreads left in the book, and while it is expanding as all delicious art journals do, there appears to be plenty of space to allow more collaging on those remaining pages.

I'll be back with more journal peeks when there is more to share!