I mentioned a while back that I took an online class from Kelly Kilmer called A Life Made By Hand. My first Telling Your Story column in the Evansville Courier and Press was about art journals.
Until taking that class I just didn’t get the idea of art journals. Coming from a traditional journal keeping background, it was hard for me to understand how an art journal could help express feelings.
However, the more I worked with these pages, I understood and really liked the whole concept of expressing feelings with not just words, but with paper, paint, and whatever I wanted to use.
Kelly’s class included regular journal prompts which I didn’t use since I have my own stash of them. But I loved that she also included collage layout templates to help those of us collage-challenged to get started.
Most of my pages use one of my own photos as a focal point. However, I did make some with pictures from magazines.
Here are a few of my pages. I’ve not yet made them into a book. Right now they are hanging on a line in my studio/woman cave.
This page is all about what is enough. This picture was shot at one of the gardens that was on our garden walk tour in 2009. I loved how they had all of their shovels all lined up against the shed. (If I would do this page over again, I’d make the picture much bigger.) Anyway, looking at that picture brought to mind that we seem to always be looking for more. This page lists the questions that quickly came to mind after the layout was finished: What is enough? When do we stop? Do we need it all? What is order? What is chaos? Where do I fit in this whole process? What’s it all about?
The picture for this one was taken from a magazine. It is all about her potential – You can be whatever you wish! Dream big!
This one is about the telephone. This picture was taken from an old book. What a gift the telephone is!
This picture was taken on our cold Florida vacation last year. It was so cold but it was a good trip.
This one is my favorite. I found this trowel as the snow was melting. I wrote “This reminds me of how tired I was last season as I planted the last of the plants and got the gardens ready for sleep. Seeing this today made me tired, but also excited to think about the new season to come.”
I sure can relate to that tiredness today!
I am still working on this art journal. I used scrapbook paper for these pages, but I could use some of my painted or homemade paper. Then next time I’ll try just painting with no paper. It’s been a real learning and stretching experience for me. I’m anxious to push myself more in this direction.
I love seeing your pages! I hope that the class has helped to push you in a new direction of seeing things! 🙂
Kelly, Yes, it did! Thanks for dropping by.
I’ve never found that an art journal page helps me express myself — I’m too left-brained and fact-based to go that route. I’ve made a collage page or two but have struggled with them. My scrapbook/journal pages have always been focused on the person, not a ‘feeling’. But that’s just me.
Love them all Lynda, especially the “Dream Big” and “Telephone” one! I’ve done some scrapbooking but I love that this is more about inspiration and feelings than documentation. How long does it take you to do a page?
Lynn, I know what you mean about struggling with collage pages. Kelly’s technique using a collage template really helped me.