Art Journal Every Day – Keep an Art Journal

I am participating with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s Art Journal Every Day. The idea is to get you to do at least 10 minutes of art every day. Of course once I get started I generally keep going.

At my house winter brings earlier dinners and long, long evenings. Yes, yes I know it’s been this way since Halloween, but I was very busy from October through the holidays. Very busy and often away from home. But now I’m looking at 3 more months of slow, cold, dark days…eeek…I could get depressed!

Instead, almost every year, I come up with a doodle project, which fits in well with making art for 10 minutes a day . Last year I made zentangle ATCs, dozens and dozens of them. You can see some of them in the banner.  This year zentangles seem entirely uninteresting…So for the past couple of weeks I’ve been making journal signature pages.

Blue and Yellow Journal signature page spread

It is kind of like coloring in a color book, but it gives my hands something easy to do at the end of the long evening when I’m tired. The above spread was done with my new Inktense pencils on drawing paper.

Pink & Green Journal Signature

This one I did on Strathmore 140 pound water color paper. Still using the Inktense pencils for this and Pitt “B” pens for the outlines. This is a really good spatial exercise as I had done 3 pages on both sides before it dawned on me that if I put them into a book, they will not be side-by-side unless they are the middle fold of the signature.

This is the back side of the pink page spread.

Thus this red page could conceivably be right beside the fuchsia pink – ewwww.

So I will now  make some spreads that will isolate reds from pinks and still be bold and fun.

I started a new one last night and even though I knew it would not sit in the book as two consecutive pages, I still made it as if it would! Darn. Well I like it the best so far so maybe it will be the centerfold.

Centerfold Journal Signature - Red and green on brown

Most of the art journals I’ve made lately have been collage journals, which give me fits when it comes time to add my written thoughts. I don’t want to mess up a beautiful collage by putting text in the wrong place, or making it too big, or too small – or some way that is the wrong way – that messes up an otherwise great collage.

So I will make a couple of fun journals with places especially for my writing. And then I can add doodles and collage for eternity – after I’ve had my say.