Art Journal Cover

Well, finally I made it and dived into art journalling! It took me quite a while to find the appropriate approach for me without feeling that this is not "me" but "art journalling as it is done". I admire so many art journal artists, who do a lot of colourful painting and drawing and doodleing... but "my style" is different and it took some time to unravel it from all my impressions found in blogland.

But now that I feel confident with what I do, I dared buy an art journal to work in!!! And today I created the cover to turn this wonderful empty piece of card art into my piece of art. (And by doing so I understood my pupils' fear of plain, white paper for the first time *lol).

Yes, you are right - it's the awesome art journal from finnabair's collection! And it is such a well thought-out design - with all its pockets, the manila and card pages, the envelopes and bags! Just brilliant!

I went for a rather reduced colour scheme and covered the cover with a thick layer of white Gesso for a start. I also coated some metal embellishments with white Gesso for later use.

I used a scrap from a journal page that I had overdone and therefore cut to scraps for use with a different project. Sometimes these cut out pieces look so much better than the whole page you cut it from!

I glued it to the cover after some heavy spritzing and playing with some Mr. Huey's and Chalk mists and also some diluted acrylic colours.

The wire stamp is from BoBunny (love it!). It is from the "Distressed Textures" clear stamps set and also available at SimonSaysStamp over here.

Why do I tell you this? Because by doing so I can enter their actual Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge where "Stamp-tember" is celebrated with a group blog-hop!

The "inspire" quote was applied through one of my new awesome Red Lead stencils!

I just love their stencils as they are perfect for art journalling!

I also rubbed some DecoArt Metallic Lustre "Gold rush" onto some areas of the gessoed cover, creating kind of stripes with my finger.


The washi tape is from a sale at a home decorations store.

I also applied some white and gold decorating paste through a stencil for more texture.

To add some more texture I stamped a border onto the cover's edge, using the lovely leaf stamp from 3rd Eye!

I also enter this cover to Artful Times' challenge "Scrap Art" as the center piece of my creation is a scrap from a journal page that I messed up and cut to pieces.

Did I mention that I love to use scraps from messed up paintings or pages? ;)

Thank you for staying with me this far and I hope you enjoyed your visit!

Hugs and happy crafting/journalling/... !

die amelie x