Monday, February 13, 2012

First spreads from the In Between Journal

As you all may know by now I'm working in what I call my In Between Journal. Last Friday I posted a tutorial on how I prepped this journal with simple watercolors and a sponge and today I will show you some of the first spreads from this journal.

The journal came into being because my second remains of the day journal ROD2 was finished, but the journal I had planned to use right after it was not nearly ready for use. I like my journals to have a base to work from. This is mostly because I work in my journals early in the morning and I just don't have the time then to also have to paint and color a spread. I want to get straight to writing and decorating when I actually journal.

The In Between Journal is a small sketchbook that I bought years ago at the National Gallery in London (only my favorite city in the whole wide world!). The cover of the journal has a painting on it, but I figured I would make it my own by adding some penwork and some stickers. Here's how the cover looks now:


I sincerely apologize to all Gallen-Kallela fans for this blasphemous act! ;-) The paper in the sketchbook is a mediocre drawing paper. Not very flimsy, not very thick, but just fine for my purposes. I enjoy the smallness of this book after a couple of rather profound journals like the altered atlas and ROD2. I feel like I'm going back to basics a little and that is nice.

The In Between Book is the first journal I have ever dedicated to anybody else. That is to say: I have dedicated it to all the generous ladies who have given me wonderful collage fodder and other ephemera over the past year or two. There's a lot of that ephemera in this little book and it was extra fun to put that in. I put an elaborate dedication on the first spread and that felt quite special. Maybe I will dedicate more journals in the future.

Now without further ado I'll just show you the first eight spreads of this journal. Some have little interactive tabs and I'll show those as well. I'll just let it all speak for itself.













A commenter on my tutorial asked what I do after the watercolor prepping and basically I do what I do in all my journals: I add writing and images and decorative elements. That's all. My journals are decorated diaries, they are creative and fun, but not necessarily art journals (or what I consider art journals, but that's a matter of perspective, not fact). I use stickers, magazine images, rub-ons, pretty papers, found every day items, tape and my own photographs. There's no rhyme or reason as to why some things are put together. I don't plan these pages out or anything, they just happen. The writing often has very little to do with the images.

Well, I hope you enjoyed looking at these first spreads. I will show more as I go along.
For now I wish all of you a very happy and artsy week!