I deadheaded some day lilies while out back with the dog. They bled red on my hands, so I thought they would make a pretty flower pounding page in my journal. And they did! But it turns out that the rich brick red color of the petals becomes purple and orange, when pounded. Who knew?
I always have one page in whatever book I’m working in that I use to remove leftover ink from my stamps.
If you’re using a spiral bound notebook or sketchbook, you can tip in items using a paper clip. This allows the item to easily flip independently of the facing pages, and it gives you access to the back of the item.
And yes, I’m obsessed with trees lately.
mixed media in art journal
I am a horrible person who feels no pangs of regret when pulling spines off old books, to use in collage. But if I didn’t pull spines off books, you would never get to see the pretty stitching underneath.
The book’s pages will also be cut up and recycled.
A book on sketchbooks, written by a man, contains artwork mostly by men. Not at all surprising. Call them “visual journals” and the author will much more likely be a woman, and the artists represented will be mostly women. Art is for men, but craft is for ladypeople. I’m reminded of a Joanna Newsom interview in which she said that men were harpists and women were harp players. We don’t let women play in male spaces (still!), but we also devalue the spaces where women are allowed to play.
(I may not even have noticed, except I started to wonder how many drawings of teen boy sexual fantasies there would be in the book. A lot. And all of them drawn by men, so I looked at the artist bios and did a quick tally of the genders: 31 men, 10 women, and one non-binary person.)
Jingle Bell Jack Book
8 x 6 1/4 inches
exposed spine sewn on tapes with waxed linen thread
96 pages recycled from old student work
cover recycled from a creepy children’s book
And finally the point of all that rummaging through old art. I found enough old drawings and sketches that were on decent(ish) paper that I was able to cobble together a nice sized book out of it.
I still have a mountain of old sketches on lightweight paper and newsprint, but those aren’t suitable to binding. I’ll probably tear them up and use them in collage. My end goal is to get rid of the giant box they’re stored in, because it is awkward as hell and a giant pain in the ass to store. It’s going to take me a while, though.
old student work
notes
I went through a big box of old student work, looking for papers I could recycle into a new art journal. I have no idea why I saved those old Foundations I projects. They are of absolutely no use. I also found dozens of 18 x 24 inch newsprint and sketch pads with covers full of assignment and class notes. Surely a small sketchbook would have been more reasonable than taking notes on the covers of my sketch pads?
mixed media collage in art journal
This is the sketch for the red boat painting. I’d intended the stars to be the Pleiades, more or less. I thought I might be able to use a stamp to create them, but that didn’t work, so I painted them freehand.
red paper boat 