Art Journaling

A couple of months ago, I picked up Somerset Studio’s Art Journaling magazine. I instantly fell in love! I have been trying to start an art journal for I don’t know how long. In fact, I have started quite a few of them, but I always seem to fizzle out. I have always found it kind of a daunting task to fill the pages… no matter how big or small the books are.

I have always been so inspired by Pam Garrison. Her art journals are absolutely amazing. I mean, everything she does is amazing, but I am especially in love with her journals. I love they way she doodles and the colors she chooses.

Fast forward to yesterday. It has been quite a long time since my family has gone to church. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of them lame excuses, some of them valid concerns. Will and I decided that it was time to listen to God and get to church on Sunday morning. I have always been a note taker. I love to sit in church and take notes from the sermon. It helps me to stay focused on the message and to better remember what God is saying to me. But, I’ve always been a doodler as well. All of my class notes always had little doodles on them because I have to stay busy or I get sleepy!

So, I decided to combine these two things on Sunday morning. As you can see from the results above, it was a great success. I am super happy with the way this turned out. Not only did I get to listen to an incredible message from my favorite Pastor, but I also got a lovely art journal page as well.

How was this accomplished? As I was taking notes from the sermon, I would just put them in spots on the page. As you can see, I generally only write down a few things that are speaking directly to my heart. While I was listening to the message, I would doodle around the notes that I had taken. When I got home, I spent the afternoon adding color and filling in where needed. This also helped me to think of the message and spend some time just praying. It was quite therapeutic, actually!

This morning, when I got up, I was inspired to copy a page from one of Pam’s post (see it here) from April 29th. As I mentioned before, I have always been intimidated by the idea of filling a whole page in one sitting. I know that this is not the way to do a journal page, but my “have to finish what I started” attitude will not allow me to walk away from an unfinished page. I’m working on that, but for now I needed to find a way to get over that hump. Pam’s post talks about breaking up a page into days. Her page is much better, but here is my incomplete version:

I’ll keep you posted as to how this works out for me. This is a journal that I stamped in 3 years ago at Creative Escape. I never completed the project, but I’ve always wanted to use it for an art journal. This seemed like the perfect project for this journal.

One last thing, I finally took some new pictures of our new itty bitty kitty (as we call her). She is quite the monster now that she’s healthy. She’s already chewed threw the box springs on my bed AND the power cord for my Mac! She beats up on all three of the big boys around here, but they are very tolerant of her. She has even been seen putting the smack down on the dogs, which I think is too funny considering she is the smallest creature in the house right now.

Ah… but we are so blessed to have her!