Art Journal Prompt #8 | Suite101.com

Posted by
Jenn Greenleaf
May 7, 2007

This week's art journal prompt revolves around pieces, parts and tools from other art projects you're working on or would like to work on.

Here's what you need to complete this project: (these are the left over pieces, parts and tools I had and used for my journal spread)

your art journal

earth colored colored pencils

white acrylic paint

medium sized paint brush or sponge brush

small container of water

newspaper or cardboard (to cover your workspace)

one inch square hole punch

glue stick

tea wrappers

magazine clippings

old book pages

black thin tipped sharpie Here's what we're going to do:

open your art journal to a blank page spread

using the glue stick, glue two blank pages together on each side of the spread

once the glue is dry, paint over the entire surface of both pages in the spread using the white acrylic paint (a flat finish works best)

allow to dry completely

using the square hole punch, punch holes in random places throughout the spread (my journal is long and narrow, so I punched one on each side of the spread)

affix tea wrappers in a random pattern (don't cover too much of the pages)

affix magazine clippings and old book pages throughout the spread

using the colored pencils, shade around the clippings and book pages

take a darker colored pencil (black or dark brown) and shade along the edtges of the page in a distressed ink style

write quotations, journal entries, song lyrics and other interesting text over the doodles using the black sharpie

Additional ideas to try:

Consider painting the pages using a light watercolor wash (browns, greys, yellows, oranges and greens) as the background for your pages, over the top of the white acrylic paint.
Try finding old book containing foreign text, math equations, dictionary definitions and other interesting text to mix up on the pages of your art journal.
Consider doing watercolor washes over your book pages before adding them to your pages.
Try circling interesting bits of text using the thin sharpie, then decorating and coloring the rest of the book page after it's been added to the art journal pages.
Consider choosing themed magazine clippings so the pages come together to form some sort of meaning or tell a story.