Finished Art Journal
In 2012 I bought a pink Smash book. Two years later, it’s now finished. With this video, I want to encourage you to continue art journaling. Whatever a single page looks like, it will be pretty and meaningful when being part of the full book.
Finished Art Journal – A Thick Book!
I love handling full books, the thick, filled pages just temp to open them again and again! Smash books have a lot of pages and I had to remove several of them when my book grew thicker page by page.
See the blog posts written during the years about this finished art journal:
Pretty Art Journaling
the first pages and introducing the concept of the journal
There’s a Little Girl in All of Us
drawing faces
Smash Book or Handmade Journal
using Smash book as an art journal
Homemade Happiness
creating more pages
Art Journaling about Imagination
a spread celebrating imagination
Would You Try That
playing jewellery designer
You may also recognize some artwork on the video that has been shown in this blog. I often use art journals to save them.
Here’s the back cover again which I finished on the video. I create decorated elements (like the centerpiece of the flower) now and then. They are stored with hand decorated papers and when I create collages they often work as jump starts. It always looks better if all the elements are not made in the same day! The same is with the journal itself – keep on decorating, day by day, one piece at the time!
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5 Reasons to Enjoy Cutting Paper with Scissors
I wrote an article about cutting paper with scissors to the Finnish paper crafting magazine “Paperilla.” The collage shown here was made as an illustration for the article. It is called Fruit Tree. For the collage, I picked some solid colored papers and cut them to pieces. After glueing the pieces, I added a black background and thin decorative lines with black markers. So simple yet effective!
I have nothing against die cutting machines but still – think about the possibilities of plain old scissors! It is like all the stencils and cutting files of the world are packed inside of them!
There are at least five reasons to enjoy cutting paper with scissors!
1) Hand cut pieces are 100 % You
People often worry that if they cut by hand, their circles are not perfectly round or their squares perfectly rectangular. I like to call my irregular cuts “organic.” To me, they look unique and full of potential, especially when combined with the other imperfect ones. They are a little bit like my plants – marigolds and geraniums which I grow each year. They might bloom a bit late, and they would not probably be accepted by the finest of the garden centres, but I love them.
2) While hand cutting Your subconscious guides You
When you keep on cutting those odd shapes, your imagination begins to work. Sometimes it takes less time, sometimes more, but when that happens it is like reading an interesting book, like taking a personality test … It is so much fun to find out what those scissors reveal each time!
3) You can repeat Your favorite shapes
Here are the six examples of mine! I have cut them so many time that they come out naturally. I also know a lot of ways to use them. Because of their familiarity, I can easily make variations from them. Finding your favorite shapes can even create the base of your unique style.
I also love to decorate the shapes with some doodling. That makes similar shapes look different from each other.
4) You can use Your own papers – or any papers!
As you know I love to make my own decorated papers. They are often as curvy and irregular as my hand cuts but no worry. With scissors I can cut any paper, thick or thin. I can spend time with fabulous papers or make even the ugly papers fabulous when I cut them thoughtfully. (The papers seen here are the best solids I know – my own watercolored papers where I have used several layers of watercolor to increase the color intensity. There’s gel medium in the jar for glueing the pieces.)
5) You can always think about hand cutting
You can take couple sheets of paper and the scissors with you wherever you go. Or you can just take the scissors and re-use paper from the magazines, tickets, leaflets, etc. Furthermore, I promise, you will begin to see interesting shapes everywhere. (Feel free to copy that crocus shape – a long stem with an oval shape on the top!)
6) Bonus! You are one step closer to being an artist!
Just wait, your art journal, card collection or whatever you do with the hand cut shapes will begin to live and breathe. Just keep on adding those elements!
Think about how this spread would look if I had cut the shapes using a die-cut machine. Nothing alike! Without even mentioning the differences in the experience of cutting and assembling. Art needs freedom, and your scissors can take you there!
Create more hand-cut collage art: Buy Doodled Luxury!
Decorated Papers for Knitters (or wannabe ones!)
I often get drawing ideas from crafting. I made this decorated paper by mimicking the way I knit with many colors.
Stranded knitting (or fair isle knitting as some call the technique) can feel tedious at first. Constantly changing the colors can be tiresome. But if you do that long enough, your brain will get used to it. I think it is a way of thinking: constanty interrupting what you are currently making. If you do that, you will also prevent yourself thinking too far ahead and too logically.
I began with an odd paper that had been watercolored throughout. That way I created depth instead of showing white paper between the colored areas. Color pencils work great on watercolored surfaces a long as the paper is fairly smooth. I created the paper just by adding basic shapes so that they formed some kind of fairly free grid. Changing colors and plans all the time kept the interest at the work and prevented too monotone visual appearance.
After making that paper I began to think about handdyed fiber. I love this photo of my bobbins! It’s mind-blowing when I think about spinning handdyed wool and how the color changes so seamlessly.
I also often knit socks from handdyed yarn. Like these ones I just made recently.
As a result I decided that the irregular stripes deserve to get on paper too!
I began with few colors first, again on watercolored paper.
Then I added colors. I worked pretty fast here. Even if I like my papers to be super detailed the sharp and regular stripes often look too static.
Most of my papers have round shapes. These knitting inspired ones are edgier in style. They will look great when combined with the circles. When you are building the stash of hand decorated papers for collage art, take care that you have a variety of papers.
In these papers the motif size can also be maintained fairly small. So these will look absolutely gorgeous even when cut in tiny pieces!
P.S. I you are more of a quilter than knitter, read what you can bring to art from quilting.
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Hand Bags Only You Can Make
The fashion themed Smash book is just perfect to show my love for bags. When I made these hand decorated papers became heavy fabrics and leather in my mind. It was so fun to draw stitched seams, add layers and choose decorations.
I have a lot of ugly papers in my hand decorated paper collection. I do not take my papers too seriously. Their common nominator is that they are made by myself and thus they fit together whether pretty or ugly.
If you prefer to make cards instead of art journal pages, you don’t have to miss the fun. Create bag themed cards like I did! This card is a birthday card for my sister. She loves everything red. I also added some stuff that could be found inside the bag: a lipstick, perfume bottle, small scarf and a necklace. We can always give dreams, even for people who have everything and do not want to own more.
I want my art journals to be like catalogs: full of items to pick and choose. I am like a dream shopper with a hand made credit card (how would that look like, or a row of them!). I could ask from the maker of the turquoise pouch: “Do you make these in green too?” And the maker would respond: “Of course, which tone would you like?” With a little help of image processing in Photoshop, the options are right there.
Think about it: there are millions of hand bags which you, and only you, can make!
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