5 Tips for Art Journaling
If you are wanting to start journaling your life, either through gluing in pieces of paper you collect through travels, adventures and just daily life, I highly recommend art journaling. You can add all these little bits to your pages alongside your writing, and use stickers, paint, colours through markers or pencil crayons (coloured pencils) and create these beautiful pages that tell the story of your life.
If I could give you 5 tips for creating your own art journal or junk journal...well, here they are!
My 5 tips for art journaling
1. make your signatures before the cover - it's easier to cut your cover to size than have to trim all the pages you build. Unless you’re using a thrifted book as the cover, of course! Then you’ll have to be extra diligent in measuring your inside pages, or just not care as much if they are a little uneven. Books with assorted types of paper look great with slightly uneven edges.
2. lover of heavy embellishments - do pages before binding to avoid the 'wedge'. This is especially beneficial if you want to store your journal on a bookshelf, or for it to lay flat while closed. Trust me, that wedge is difficult to store! Here’s an example of a book I did heavy embellishing on…and that’s me squeezing it closed slightly! This book is now on my list for a re-bind.
3. wax coated thread - this is essential for reducing knotting while sewing your book. You can get pre-waxed thread, or use a hunk of beeswax or a candle and run embroidery floss through it to wax it. Waxed thread comes in all sorts of different colours, and you can get it easily in bundles, or special order stunning linen ones from bookbinding businesses like Hollanders.
4. thrifted or dollar store hardcover books can be used for covers! They are already sturdy enough for covers, plus you can use inner pages for collage or experimenting. I like to use them for scrap when glueing, making fodder/collage pages, or to collage onto other projects.
5. if you don't like it, you can always take it apart and rebind it differently! This is art! It's changeable, adaptable, and you can totally scrap it if you want. If you don't like your stitching, need to remove a signature, or hate your cover...definitely consider taking the thread out and starting to rebind the book again.
Not sure what to put in your art journal?
Check out my collage kits for some beautiful papers to glue in, the flip thoughs of my own books, or check out my youtube for real time videos of me creating a spread in my journals!