What is Art Journaling?
Art journaling is a creative practice that combines writing and visual art for self-expression and self-reflection. By using images and words you express what’s going on inside you. Not to make something beautiful, but to see something clearly.
a step further
People have been keeping journals for centuries. Writers, artists, scientists, philosophers. Not to produce something, but to think, sketch and/or process. To figure out what they actually believed, felt, or wanted to say. The journal was where they worked things out, before the world ever saw the result.
Art journaling takes that idea a step further. You don’t “just write”, or “just sketch”. You draw, paint, write, collage, scribble, layer, responding to what’s on the page with colour, texture, and marks that don’t need to be explained.
Sometimes an image says something you don’t have words for yet.
I myself started art journaling in about 2005. Online I came across the work of art journaling legends like Teesha Moore and Susi Blue. Although my style clearly evolved and matured over the years, I’m still thankful for their spark.
Like with any art, you grow into it, and your taste changes over time. And that is okay. Also, you grow older, experience life and you start to long for a certain depth. This is often where people stumble over my work. Some didn’t even know that you don’t have to draw ‘pretty girl’ in art journals. And they didn’t know you can be a fully grown artist with a strong visual vocabulary, and still call it an art journal.
Yes, I too started art journaling drawing cute girls in dresses. I even owned twenty different colors of glitter glue from bubble gum pink to turquoise.
I guess the hard truth I found along the way, while art journaling, was that I was not the person who I presented myself to be. I didn’t want to be a woman who owned twenty colors of glitter glue. Through art journaling I discovered I had deep and dark layers to shine a light on. In other words… I’m not as cute as I look, lol. ;p
private space
An art journal is like a private space. A place where you can be messy, honest, experimental, confused, angry, joyful, or just bored.
A place where nothing has to mean anything, and everything can mean everything.
It’s not a sketchbook. Not a diary. It’s not a scrapbook, although it can look like one. It’s not something you make to show other people. And it definitely doesn’t have to look good.
You don’t need to be an artist to start art journaling. You don’t need to know how to draw or paint. There’s no right or wrong.
But… It’s not precious either. You can rip pages out. Paint over something you don’t like. Use cheap materials, old magazines, whatever you have.
An art journal is a place where nothing has to mean anything, and everything can mean everything.
A tool for Self-reflection
Everything you do in your art journal mirrors something in your life. If you do nothing, nothing happens. If you’re afraid to make mistakes, you stay where you are. It teaches you not to get too attached to outcomes.
In that sense, an art journal becomes a tool for self-reflection. It shows you things you already knew, but hadn’t fully seen yet.
You’re simply shining a light on something that was sitting in the dark.
Some people immediately think of creative therapy, when I say that. But it’s not that. You don’t have to dig, uncover anything, and you don’t have to analyse what you’re not ready to face.
You just make it visible.
And then you see.
So yes: art journaling is a way of getting to know yourself better through art.