I’m a very concrete, sequential, black-and-white, linear thinker.  Creativity is generally not my strong suit (except as a problem-solving thing), and art journals or other similar mixed-media artwork really throw me for a loop.  I like looking at them, but it’s totally outside my comfort zone to create them.  How do you put together all those different elements, especially in any sort of “messy” way, and have a cohesive end result?

This means, though, that it’s good for me to practice this.  It stretches me.  I thought of a particular challenge that would be beneficial to both the kids and me (which I am looking forward to sharing once we get that far, but we haven’t gotten all of our materials gathered together for it yet)…which led to thinking of art journaling challenges in general, so we’re planning for this to be a regular activity around here.

The Plan

See, for me, I can do some of these things if someone tells me what to do.  That sounds a bit counter-intuitive to the concept of art journaling, but it doesn’t have to stifle the creativity, as long as the challenges are sufficiently open-ended.  So I set out to create a list of challenges in a variety of areas – background preparation, working with mixed-media, subject matter, etc. – and we will work from these prompts.

[Update 6/1/2013: Get the art journaling prompts as an ebook!]

The kids and I can all work on the same prompt together and, of course, all of our resultant pages will be different.

Livia is pretty uncoordinated with the concept of cutting, as you can see above.  (She’s only two.)  So she more-or-less “pretends” to use the scissors and then just tears her pieces off.  (Next time I think I will try giving her some precut images to use.)  But she loves to glue.

Ariel (10) and Sophia (5)  are rather more coordinated, obviously.  Ariel does a more effective job of applying herself specifically to the challenge we’ve set for the day, but Sophia comes up with some pretty creative end results, as well.  And this way Mama gets time to play in her art journal without taking time away from the kids. 🙂

Where We Started

I haven’t finished gathering our materials yet, so that we are thoroughly prepared.  And with a baby coming any day now, I was not up for the mess of paint.  So we decided to start with a simple, low-key background-preparation option that would help us get some pages ready for future work.  Our challenge was to tear colored strips from magazine pages, and glue them on in “stripes” to completely cover our backgrounds.  Livia and Sophia pretty well skipped this and just cut stuff out to glue on.  Ariel and I each did a page this way, and then prepared a couple more pages by gluing on colored “collaged” backgrounds, but not necessarily in strips.

The Prep

The nice thing about this is it didn’t take a lot of fancy supplies.  (In fact, I’m planning to put together an ebook of challenges that can be used with beginners/children like this, that don’t take any special “art” supplies.  I’d love to know if you have any interest in this and, if so, if there are particular things you’d like to see included.)  We used glue sticks, scissors, old magazines, and cardstock.  That’s it.  But the plan is to get ourselves together an “art journaling kit” with a few more basic supplies.

I use a 6×9″ sketchbook with watercolor pages.  (I love these, and use them for “regular” journaling, as well.  And have been using one for my day planner so far this year.)  The kids decided they’d rather work on individual pages and bind them together later, though.  So we just trimmed white cardstock in half.  (Cardstock is better than printer paper, because it’s sturdy enough to handle paint, glue, multiple layers, etc.)  Our “kit” will probably include:

• Scissors (enough for everyone to use a pair simultaneously – these are our favorites)
• Glue sticks (ditto – we kept having to pass these around and wait on them, which just isn’t necessary if we’re prepared)
• Old magazines for cutting up
• Fine point and ultra-fine point black Sharpies  (Cheap and simple, but will allow for writing on top of other elements.)
• Our stack of white cardstock
• Baggies of miscellaneous flat-ish objects that could be glued into journals, and/or magazine elements we’ve already cut out but haven’t used.

(We also already have a box of paints elsewhere, which will come out on days when it’s appropriate.  They also have colored pencils, which are likely to get use for this purpose in the future.)

[See our finished pages here.]

Although I have gesso and inks, and some other more “official” art journaling supplies, I don’t think these are necessary for the kids at this point.  (And, frankly, I think they’d be wasted on the two littlest ones at the moment.)  As they get older, and if they decide they really love this, we can consider investing in these sorts of things for them, but it’s not necessary to spend a lot on fancy supplies just to get started.

How do you feel about art journaling?  Have you ever tried it?  Would you consider it?  If you haven’t tried it, is there something specific holding you back?

This post is shared at Titus 2 Tuesday, Tackle it Tuesday, and Teach-Me Tuesday.