I don’t often look back at my old art journals unless I’m showing someone else my work. It’s not for any particular reason; I’m just more interested in the process, generally, than the outcome. I also share a lot of my work online so don’t have need to reference the originals.
Yesterday, though, I flipped through my most recently finished journal and realized that there are several pages that I haven’t shared online (see above). Some pages I love and some I don’t — but that’s exactly as it should be.
My art journal, after all, is a playground where I can explore, express myself, mess up, and play. (So is yours!)
Here are two recent art journal pages, made literally back to back. I really love the simplicity, color palette, and composition of both — and also feel like they complement each other well as individual pieces.
The top spread has a piece of newspaper torn from the Baltimore Beat, featuring the upcoming Hampdenfest event; the bottom has part of an Ohio road map I have, for some reason, in my possession. I also used pages from a book I found in a little library a while back.
This is what life has looked like recently: chaotic, unpredictable, and all over the place.
Since I first began art journaling, the pages have been a place to express — first in words, then over the years through marks and color and other symbolism — the ups and downs of my life.
I can open a journal to any spread, and it will transport me to a different moment in time: college, living in Philadelphia, studying abroad. What a gift it is to be able to have that record of a years-long conversation with yourself, to have evidence of your experiences and your struggles and your joys!
I’ve been working near-daily in my art journal — adding collage, oil pastel, tempera paint, drips of acrylic ink, and pencil and paint marker scribbles. Here is some of my recent work.
For each piece of polished, finished art shared online, every artist has a whole pile of unfinished, “messed up,” or ugly pieces. And that’s exactly as it should be.
I, for example, don’t love the art journal spread above.
It started out with some collage and minimal marks with oil pastel and black India ink, but I realized that it reminded me of camouflage and hunting — not something that resonates with me. I added more colors and marks, still hated it, and then covered up most of it with white tempura paint. It’s fine. Whatever. I’ll turn the page and do something else.
For years, I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen: make ugly art.
It’s one of the first things I recommend to emerging artists, those who are afraid of messing up (whatever that might mean) or who desperately want to be able to translate what’s in their mind onto the page but haven’t practiced long enough to know how to do that.
Purposefully making ugly art lessens the fear of creating something you dislike and is a great exploratory process.
Some ideas for making ugly art:
Use color combinations you don’t like or usually use
Scribble out or paint over sections of your work
Stick down collage any which way
Try using tools you haven’t used before
Use materials you aren’t usually interested in or aren’t special: tissue paper or wrapping paper, a receipt, a ripped ad from a magazine, etc.
Move quickly and impulsively, not thinking about what you’re going to do next
The best part about setting out to create ugly art? If you finish it and hate it, you’ve succeeded. But if you finish it and love it or love sections of it, you’ve also succeeded.
No matter the outcome, you are creating, exploring, practicing, and learning so much more about what you do and don’t like.
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