art journals

A project I’ve been doing the last few weeks of January has been decorating my journal covers. I felt inspired to collage my money tracking book though watching ihanna pimp hers, when she said ‘When they are colourful and pretty I tend to use them more’ I thought ‘Yes! So true!’ Don’t get me wrong I’m no stranger to black sketchbooks, I have a shelf of them. Though when she said this my heart somersaulted and it did it again while I was in a craft store looking at a box of gems.

I followed this feeling (and another of replacing my old glue gun since watching Paris Hilton at her canvas) and got both. After some pink paint, two glue guns an 8mm and 7mm, 2 boxes of gems, and 25 sticks of glitter glue it was complete.

This project was paused while I scanned local shops for a 7mm glue gun, waited for the glitter to come in slow pandemic mail, and generally had the inner critic hovering round ‘Is this even going to work/look good/be finished, ever?!

I wanted these journal covers to be strong and beautiful, I added pictures of me as a celebration of myself.

I added words TRUST and BE then finally FAIL, the last is important as I’m learning when we fail we learn about ourselves and grow as a person. There’s also a great podcast hosted by Elizabeth Day called How to fail.

It was fun, if I was to do it again I would skip straight to the smaller glue gun and more glitter glue sticks. I played the entire time, I didn’t watch a video or look up ‘How to glue gun gems’ I went ahead and did it. When I glittered the page with purple and silver I felt like I had made a book for a princess.

Ah, another somersault.

These journals are half done, I’ve had them a year and instead of going to buy another and ‘starting afresh’ I’m choosing to finish these in all their glory and make them uniquely mine. I’ve never done this before and I’m not sure of the order of dates and it will be full of painting, collage and mixed media – I’m going with it!

I’d love to see your journal covers, share your comments below.