Art Journal Every Day: Collage Sketchbook Flip Through

If you’re new to Art Journal Every Day, the concept is simple: It’s a commitment to take ten minutes each day to do something in your art journal.  No need to finish anything or even like it.  It’s about making the time to nourish your creativity every day!  If you have the time to flip through your phone, you have the time to Art Journal Every Day.  If you’d like to share what you make, use the hashtag #artjournaleveryday so that we can all take a peek.  You can find new Art Journal Every Day posts here on the blog most Fridays.  The archives go back to the first Art Journal Every Day post in 2010.

I recently finished filling a small book that I made during A Year of Gelatin Printing.  It’s an art journal, but I really think of it as a “collage sketchbook.”  I used the pages to explore color relationships, ideas, patterns, layering, and more.  Because I’m using it to experiment with different ideas, not all of the pages are successful. Some are really ugly or quite problematic and that’s totally fine with me.  I’m simply trying to find a way to explore ideas, color combinations, compositions, patterns, and even my tools.  As I work, I’m asking myself: what do I like? What do I not like? Are there certain ideas I want to repeat?  Take a peek in this short video:

I tend to work on my pages in stages.  What that means is that I rarely sit down and complete a page from start to finish. In fact, almost the only time I do that is if it’s for some kind of video or demonstration. Most of the time, the way I prefer to work, is to do a little bit on a page then flip to a different page, then I flip to a different page and then I come back to the original page and then I go back to the other page – I bounce around. So it could take me a very long time to finish a page.  I don’t even go in the order of the book.  I tend to work on what looks interesting to me in the moment. This is part of what keeps me motivated. Because I pay attention to what interests me, I don’t have this idea that I have to begin at the beginning or finish something that doesn’t speak to me anymore. And when I’m frustrated, all I do is turn the page. I do something else so that I never end up in this place where the art is not fun.

As I say in the video: one of the things I hope you take away from seeing this book is that you need to experiment and make mistakes and do things that are ugly or don’t work and just see what happens. If you don’t experiment; if you don’t try, then you’ll never know. And if you don’t know, then you’ll always be a little bit paralyzed

Here are a few of my favorite pages:

I really enjoyed working in this small format.  Because of that, I’ve made myself a few more small books for further exploration.

What size art journal do you like to work in?

Thanks for stopping by!