What's So Great About An Art Journal? - Part 1
What silly reasons keep you from keeping an art journal even though it seems like a good idea?
Sunday, October 12, 2008
If you’ve been following what goes on at Cre8it, you know that a very big chunk of 2008 has been devoted to the Art Journal.
I held my first “Love This Journal” Workshop in January (for 76 students!), and Friday begins the seventh session! And that’s not to mention the four sessions of the second level “Love This Journal” Workshops we have completed so far.
People really do *LOVE* their art journals and the practice of art journaling is becoming as widespread and popular as sliced bread.
I can’t even count the wonderful changes in my life because I keep my art journals, and I have therefore become an evangelist on the subject. When something makes me really happy, I like to share that happiness. There is *so* much in art journaling for every creative soul, and most folks even have a sense of that already.
Every artist/artisan I have met has at least a niggling desire to keep an art journal, and most have made moves in that direction over the years - resulting in very tall piles of very pretty, and very empty journals sitting around on their bookshelves. Some have even taken the time to make their own journals, but never quite got anything into them. What stops them? It’s surprising how similar their answers are . . .
Silly Reasons for Not Keeping an Art Journal:
I’ll wreck a page and then the journal will be ruined.
In the first place, you can’t wreck a page because this is your book and you never have to show anyone that page. But I do know that it’s *you* that is going to give *you* the hardest time about it, so I have 3 solutions to “fix” a wrecked page (4 if you count knocking off your inner critic, but that’s harder).
1. You can write on the page the reasons it didn’t work out and then the page becomes notes on an experiment. Example: “Here’s why you shouldn’t answer the phone in the middle of painting a watercolor wash.” This note makes your streaky watercolor wash page ok.
2. You can glue two pages together and hide the “bad” page forever - even from yourself. Or glue something on top of just the “bad” part.
3. You can cut the page out of the book, leaving just a one inch tab to keep the binding intact. The tab could be used for “tipping in” a new page as well.
I can’t draw.
Good news - you don’t have to. There are rubber stamps, photographs, and collage images you can use to illustrate your pages. I use a lot of “Guerrilla” photographs, myself. But the very cool thing is that keeping an art journal sort of gets you drawing in a way that sneaks up on you. I slip little drawing lessons into my workshops and students are drawing these things well without even knowing how it happened. An art journal can open that drawing door for you and drawing is something most folks want to do anyway.
I can’t write.
An art journal (also known as a visual journal) doesn’t need much writing, but if you get the urge to be verbose, it accommodates as much writing as you want to add. However, a beautiful journal page can be created from just a favorite quote with some color added.
I don’t have time.
Yes, you do. You have 24 hours in every day just like we all do. How you allot that time is up to you - even if it seems like it isn’t.
The reason we don’t think we have time for anything is that we load up our lives with too much stuff, and then attempt to multi-task to get it all done. In the first place, we never get it all done, because we are constantly adding more stuff. And secondly, human beings are actually not physically capable of doing more than one thing at once, so multi-tasking is just an illusion. What you are really doing is starting and stopping different tasks in a random fashion, not doing a very good job at any of them. This is the reason it sometimes feels like a bunch of loose springs are rattling around in your head.
Choosing a piece of time to do just one thing and communing with yourself in your art journal is both a meditation and an organizer. I find that putting some of my ideas down on the page sort of “takes care” of them for the moment and preserves them for another time, so I no longer have to carry them around in my overcrowded head.
I can’t commit to doing something every day.
Ideally, I would love to work in my art journal every day, but I just can’t do it some days, because I’ve allotted my 24 hours to other things.
However, I make sure that I *touch* my journal every day. By that I mean just opening it and turning pages. It’s my all time favorite book to look at because it is colorful, beautiful, and all about me! It’s full of the moments of my life - many of which would otherwise have been forgotten. Sometimes, because I have it in my hands, I am moved to do a little something in it, and sometimes not, and that’s ok. I get a little joy and peace just looking at it.
I’ve tried journaling, but I never finish more than a few pages, and I don’t like going back and reading about the same “stuff” I haven’t resolved yet.
I have two cardinal rules for my art journal:
1. I *never* record negative stuff. That’s fine for people who want to do that, but as I said, I love to go back and enjoy the moments I record in my Art Journal. I surely don’t want to revisit angst. Once is enough for whining my way through something, and I don’t want to make a memorial to the occasion so I can run that negative chemistry through my system again later!
2. I *never* have to finish a page if I don’t want to or don’t have time. This is a really freeing idea. It means I can jot down part of an idea even if I only have a moment. It means I can start something pretty elaborate and don’t have to finish it in one sitting.
But, the most important benefit is that my art journals (I have 9 volumes now!!) are like coloring books or those creative activity books you buy for kids. Since I have lots of unfinished pages, I can do a little bit here and there whenever I want to. Even when there isn’t much time, or I’m not feeling inspired, I can just open my journal and color, or add a few lines to a sketch in progress, or answer a question I now have the answer to.
Art journal pages are ongoing, interactive, creative conversations with yourself, and what could be better than that?
Art Journaling just isn’t my thing.
This is the silliest excuse I’ve heard. Huh? *YOU* aren’t your thing?
The reasoning goes something like this: “I’m a quilter, so that wouldn’t work for me.” You can substitute painter, sculptor, stamper etc. for quilter in that sentence.
Although art journals are most definitely art-full, art journaling is not a “genre” that you would have to choose instead of your quilting or whatever. It is a facilitator for all genre. No matter what form of art you do, the art journal is the perfect companion to it and I am going to talk more about that next time.
Meanwhile. . .
The last “Love This Journal” workshop for this year starts on Friday. This class has made art journalers out of hundreds of folks so far, and we’d love to have you join us:
I know that many of my Love This Journal graduates will be reading this post. We would really enjoy hearing what your art journal means to you . . .
