Hi everyone!
The week before last I posted an article on essential supplies to get started art journaling. If you haven’t checked out the article, you can see it here. In the article, I outlined all of the tools that I use and also included some links to where you can purchase the essential tools cheap! I promised to share some pages from my art journal, but I got so wrapped up in Fat Fasting and Halloween crafts, that I haven’t gotten around to it until now. For the next few days, I am going to post a page per day and talk a little about how I put together the layouts.
Today’s art journal page was inspired by gardens. I absolutely adore gardening, and like art journaling, I find gardening to be very therapeutic. The smell of grass, the feeling of cold, damp dirt on my hands, and the vibrant hues of flowers and butterflies both stimulate the senses and relax the mind. When I was little, my favorite movie was “The Secret Garden,” and I begged my parents year after year for a secret garden for Christmas! While Santa never brought me a secret garden, I was very fortunate to grow up on a farm that had hidden creeks, wild buttercups growing on hillsides, forested alcoves, and acres of vast pastureland, so I had plenty of outdoor areas to inspire imaginative play.
To put together the layout for my gardening page, I used a combination of photographs printed from Pinterest, stickers, and imagination! One tip I have for people who are just getting started art journaling is to have way more pictures than you actually need to fill up the page. This makes it far easier to achieve a well-balanced, aesthetically-pleasing layout, because you don’t have to settle for a lesser aesthetic in an effort to fill up space. I also think that it is important to pick a color palette, and try to find photographs that fall within your color palette. I like to create “layers” when creating a paper collage much in the same way that you create layers in Photoshop (For a free trial of Photoshop, click here!). Use background images to “fill” the white space and then use close-up “detail” images in the foreground. For example, the butterflies, garden chair, and bird are the “detail” images in my gardening collage and they are in the foreground. Behind them, I have a layer of quotes, and in the background, I have less detailed images of landscapes and flowers. You will notice that the images in the foreground are much larger and more detailed than the images in the background. This creates a sense of balance in this layout. To create depth in your layout, you can use receding images that lead to unknown points in the distance. In my gardening page, the receding images are the forest paths and stairs. Because our eyes can’t see the end points in these images, our brain registers a sense of depth. Finally, don’t be afraid of texture! This particular layout has bumblebee stickers that pop off the page as well as a movable butterfly. The blue and pink butterfly is only partially glued to the page so that you can move the wings back and forth. This adds an element of surprise to the design and the interactive component is fun for whoever is flipping through your art journal (even if it’s just you!!).
In conclusion, there really is no right or wrong way to put together a page in your art journal, but these tips will help guide you as you are getting started. Stay tuned for more pages from my art journal! Namaste!
P.S. Photographs of my entire art journal can be found on Behance, entitled “Musings of a Dreamer.” If you want to see the entire thing before I post the page-by-page, feel free to check it out! 🙂
