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Journaling – Part IV – Accidental Pages

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Some of my favorite art journal pages were accidents that occurred over time. Below are just a few examples.

Journaling - Part IV - Accidental Pages via lilblueboo.comOur Lady of Guadalupe: I started sketching this picture out and didn’t like the direction it was going. I used some gel medium to make it glossy and it ended up smearing my initial drawing. So over a few weeks I just kept going back to it when I was on a plane or stuck in a motel room and just didn’t feel like writing. It was drawn in dots, hatch marks, lines and squiggles using color sharpie markers.

Journaling - Part IV - Accidental Pages 2 via lilblueboo.com
Cruel as the bitterness of life: This page was first a few collage layers that didn’t turn out right. I started covering it with crayon, sanding off layers and ended with a distressed paper/wax “mess” that looked aged with a few ghostly images peeking through. I started writing the words and the gel pen wouldn’t work and because the page was so thick I just ended up carving the words into the page. They didn’t show up on the background so I used some “white out” to fill the carving with. The words are from the movie Frida when Diego Rivera was describing her life’s work at the end: acid and tender, hard as steel, fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a smile, cruel as the bitterness of life. I messed up the quote.
Journaling - Part IV - Accidental Pages 3 via lilblueboo.com
Ganesh: This page resulted from a couple gel transfers gone awry.  I just kept painting over them with acrylic and doing another transfer until I got the last one right. There are also some layers of origami paper worked in as well.
Lesson learned: If you aren’t happy with your initial page, leave it and come back….maybe even several times! The more layers you add the more interesting the page becomes.

Journaling – Part III – Just draw it!

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Journaling - Part III - Just draw it via lilblueboo.comThe thing I love about “art journaling” is that I don’t have to come up with words to describe a moment in time that I want to remember. I was a math major in college and never really had to do much writing so I struggle with it! This entry back in 2006 was just a picture I drew of the “perfect lunch” with my mother-in-law Gale. We were at this charming little cafe called Squeez-In in Truckee near Lake Tahoe and ordered enough veggies for 4 people…and ate all of it. It was such an awesome spread that I had to draw it in my journal.

Other ideas for your journal:
Draw a map of a place you want to remember. I was on a plane once drawing the below map of the old farm where I used to keep my horse when I was younger. The lady next to me leaned over and commented “you must be writing a children’s book” and I think she was puzzled when I told her that it was just a journal entry. Mr. Rea, the farmer, was such a character and the land had been in his family for over a 100 years so there was much to explore. I had so many memories that kept coming to mind as I drew and labeled that I could barely keep up: the broken down tractors everywhere, the secret locked fields, the tree that Hurricane Hugo claimed, the wrecks on the curved road…..I thought I’d post this page for all my friends that grew up at Rea Barn.

Journaling - Part III - Just draw it 1 via lilblueboo.com

Draw the layout of your childhood home. Draw the floorplan of an old house you want to remember.  You will be surprised at what starts triggering your memory….furniture, where you chipped a tooth, the wallpaper color, the fort you had in the attic…..
Draw random pictures from the moment. Flipping through some of my journals I’ve found the most random drawings: embroidery stitches I wanted to remember, seating charts, the shape of a cookie….. My little 2.5 lb yorkie Diesel loves his little miniature toys. Each one has a name. These are old “friends” of his before we had our daughter Sienna. Now he is only interested in whatever she is playing with.
Journaling - Part III - Just draw it 2 via lilblueboo.com
If you need a new journal check out the charming vintage journals by Robin of The Fancy Lamb! Robin repurposes old books into journals. She even throws in an original book page here and there throughout the journal as a surprise. I love recycling old items into new so these are right up my alley….slight imperfections, character and unique charm. Robin has offered 20% off any journal purchase to Lil Blue Boo readers, so make sure to include “Lil Blue Boo” in the notes to seller! Thanks Robin!

Journaling – Part II

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I have a whole shelf of amazing books on journaling. Here are just a few books that I would flip through on a regular basis for inspiration. I’m pulling them back out to get inspired again. Read them, borrow them, buy them, share them….you won’t regret it!
The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon If you haven’t heard of Dan Eldon, once you see what he was about and what he compiled in his short life, you will never forget him. Visit his journals online here.

both by Gwen Diehn


all by Sabrina Ward Harrison

And last but not least, visit Teesha Moore’s website and blog.
I found this journal entry late last night and just found it hilarious. It was written about 2 weeks before I walked into the office at my investment banking job one day and quit abruptly to pursue my passion of painting and creating. It is a very telling entry just by the border I wrote at the top “rut….rut…..rut…..”

Journaling - Part II via lilblueboo.com

It reads “stayed home from work today…not feeling well. not sure if it is a virus or stress. funny thing is I didn’t call in sick or anything…no one seemed to notice.”

I am thankful that I realized that if I didn’t care enough to call in sick, and no one at work cared enough to check to see where I was then maybe it was time to move on. Once I started carting journals and ziplock bags full of crayons and markers onto corporate jets, my career in leveraged finance began to end.
On a lighter note, that day I also bought a monoxide detector (which detected no monoxide in our house) and received new MBT sneakers in the mail which are supposed to “firm your butt.”
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