Art Journaling, It's a Beginning

Back in October I was looking around Pinterest for ideas on journaling. I haven't kept a consistent journal for almost 15 years and thought that I really needed to keep track of what was going on in my life.  I have a horrible memory and sometimes my girls ask me about things and I can't remember.  I wanted to keep track of what happens in our life so I can remember and also have that memory to pass down to my children.  My mother-in-law gave each of her children a journal with pictures of fun things that happened when they were growing up.  It's a nice thing to have and add to our family history.


Over the years,  I had started writing in a few different journals but would lose interest so quickly in just writing about the day to day happenings.  I looked at the last journal that I kept and it was full of ticket stubs, notes from friends, airplane tickets, napkins from restaurants, and mementos from places I had visited.  It is full of wonderful things that help me remember the fun I had for those two years. It was more like a scrapbook (without pictures) than just a regular journal.  That got me thinking of different ways I could use a journal to record memories.  Then I turned to Pinterest to see what other people have pinned for ideas on how to make journaling more interesting.  What really caught my attention was people that do art journals. Here is a link to my Art Journaling Pinterest board. Below are a few examples of art journal pages.

Here is a daily Calendar journal. 

A simple but detailed page you can find at Smitha Katti's website.

A page by Little Black Kitty

Combining your creativity with preserving memories is such a fun idea.  You can make a page be about a certain topic that you want to write about, or a list of places you want to go, or you can draw a picture about your favorite place and add in your writing about it.  Your pages can all be an artistic representation of how you are feeling. You can do a page in all fancy writing, or spirals, or write sideways. The great part about art journaling is that you can do it in whatever way you want, you can make it your own.

Here are a few of my simple beginning art journal pages. I did these before watching tutorials. As I practice I'm hoping that my pages will begin to look more like the ones that I've pinned.

I used scrapbook paper, stickers, pictures from magazines, felt embellishments, and colored pencils.