Ever have one of those weeks where a big bus comes out of nowhere and smashes into your carefully stacked-up schedule - knocking things every which way?

 

Well, I just had one and I’m so glad it’s over. Mid October always gets nuts for me - maybe because I always have to file my taxes on extension and I hate numbers, and because the first frost comes along and I have to scurry to protect the plants I want to Winter-over. This week, we threw in an injured dog (he’s fine now) and starting construction on a new room. Yikes! Anyway, all’s well the ends well, and thank heavens this past week ended that way.

I promised to talk a little more about how an art journal can facilitate your other artistic and creative endeavors, and so I shall . . .

 

How An Art Journal Can Help If:

When I get some cool new fabric patterns, I make a color copy of them and then cut swatches from the copies to put in my journal. Easier to glue in, doesn’t waste the actual fabric, and keeps the book flatter. I also use my paper “fabric” pieces to work out designs in my journal. Lots easier to cut shapes and glue-stick them into a test pattern, than it would be to sew the real fabric or draw an accurate rendition of the fabric pattern.

 

2. Here’s a bit more elaborate approach. Say you have a design using four fabrics. Place your four fat squares on a copier so they each take about 1/4 of the page. Make a letter size color copy. Then make a black line drawing of your pattern that will fit in 1/4 of a letter size page. Glue four copies of it on a single letter size of paper and then make a copy of that 4-up right onto your fabric copy (just run the page through again). Cut out the sections of each design, and you will have all pieces in all 4 fabrics to arrange and rearrange to your heart’s content. Glue different renditions onto a single journal spread so you can choose your favorites - or use them all in a quilt!

 

3. You can also copy that 4-up of your design onto Sheer Heaven, transfer it into your journal, and then experiment with color schemes using color pencils, markers etc.

 

4. Obviously, an art journal is also a place to develop your patterns in the first place, and to collect photos of favorite quilts, quilts you want to try, and all the tips you gather while reading your quilting magazines. There are endless possibilities, but this is a start. Feel free to Comment with your suggestions.

You are a Quilter or Fabric Artist

When you first think about it, a book with paper pages doesn’t seem to have much to do with what you do, does it? You could sew some pages together, sketch some design possibilities, but what else?

 

1. A journal is a great place to keep track of your fabric stash (or some of it, anyway!). I’m not a quilter, but I am in love with those coordinated packs of fat squares. I often make handmade book covers and other things - not from the actual fabric - but from color copies of it. I just use one of the 3-in-1 inkjets as a copier.

You are a Rubber Stamper. . .

Rubber stampers love making cards and sending them to friends, but there are never enough occasions (or friends) for all the stamp art you would really like to do. And it’s kind of sad that all your beautiful designs go out the door - never to be seen by you again.

 

1. I suggest that part of the time, you switch to doing your stamp art in an art journal instead. The pages are about the same size as a card and the paper in many art journals is almost like card stock.

 

You would have a “gallery” of your designs to look at and enjoy anytime, and you would also have a “growth chart” of your progress in your stamp art.

I confess, I am not a stamper, but I love rubber stamps and use them on occasion. I think I buy them mostly because I am taken by the art and design.

 

I also use them to test color schemes and pens or other new media that I seem to constantly collect.

 

 

An art journal is also the perfect place to keep a catalogue of the stamps you own on certain themes, and even to record color charts of your favorite inks.

 

Interspersed with finished stamp art pages, this type of art journal would be hard to pry from the hands of any devoted stamper!

You are a Scrapbooker. . .

I admit I am not a scrapbooker either, but I do know a little about it. With “journaling” used in scrapbooking to refer to the adding of text to describe photos, and with art journaling being a perfect way to keep track of the little moments in life via words and pictures, it was only a matter of time before scrapbooking and art journaling ran smack into each other.

 

The similarity of purpose makes them good bedfellows. The art journal can serve the scrapbook artist as a “scrapbook lite”, a place where simple pages can be created for those less momentous moments in life. And those journal pages can serve as testing grounds for designs and themes that may be used later in large scrapbooks.

This page is half of a spread I did to remember a fun lunch date I had with an out of state artist friend when she was visiting Santa Fe.

 

If I were a scrapbook artist, I don’t think a small occasion such as this would warrant all the work that goes into a 12x12 scrapbook page, but it was a couple hours of a very pleasant experience that might escape my memory if I didn’t keep some kind of reminder.

 

Also, it is fun to pick out the interesting details from any experience, and very good practice for the artist’s powers of observation.

 

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I welcome any ideas you might want to share about ways an art journal can facilitate art of any kind, and I will be having more to say about that, too.