If you follow me for a while, you’ll find me posting every style of art journal I can think of. I tend to have a hard time sticking to one thing when it comes to art, but I try to frame that as a positive thing, because it’s just the way it is! I like to believe that following the rabbit trails will bring me to new work that came about because I allowed myself creative liberty.

This is a project that I started a while back, but I thought it would be fun to share here. If you are a parent, you know that you will end up with a lot of paperwork from your children. Sometimes it can be a creative challenge knowing what to do with all of it. I decided to make a scrapbook, or art journal of sorts, with some of the special drawings they’ve done for school, or pictures they have made for me. To start with, I had a stack of old college yearbooks from my mom, which I decided would be a great size and structure to hold the project. I tore out half of the existing pages of one of the year books to make room for the new papers. I gessoed the book cover to prep it, then I painted the whole cover with acrylic paint. I then sketched on a design idea loosely with pencil and then drew/painted the design on the cover with Posca pens. I really enjoyed illustrations by Amy JPEG back when I was on instagram (she has a different account now.. it’s a knitting account), and so I used one of her illustrations as inspiration (I don’t mind doing this for a personal project, when I know it won’t be for sale. It’s good practice for me to try art in another style.) I painted a flower on the back and will post more photos of the journal below.

In the scrapbook I have been gluing in the children’s artwork, embellishing with some of my hand painted papers, stickers, and text. I added some flaps for interest, and some little tags sticking out on some of the pages. It’s been fun to work in a way that I wouldn’t normally work in my regular art journal. And I’m hoping this will be an enjoyable keepsake for the kids to look at when they are older. I can already see such improvement in their drawings since starting this journal.

In other news, I have started another, different style of art journal! What a surprise! Haha. It’s something I figured out that I could work on in bed at night, so that’s a definite win, and my husband hasn’t complained once about me ripping papers and using a glue stick in bed, so that’s a win too! I was thinking this particular project would lend itself well to being a 100 day project, so my current plan is to start posting that here everyday (as I’m no longer on social media), and then stick to my regular schedule of once a week posting for the longer posts. So hopefully you won’t mind emails popping up in your inbox a little more often! Praying you have a blessed day!