Inside my art journal — Katie Moody

I wrote about the four different ways I keep a creative journal and scrapbook a few weeks ago, and I shared some photos of each. I realised when I was creating that post that I hadn’t shared my art journal before – this is the one that I use mixed media for and is a very loose form of a diary – and sadly one I have stopped using. Like I mentioned in the previous post, I started an art journal at the beginning of university, and filled that one to the brim. Then I moved on to an A5 Kraft Sketchbook I bought from Paperchase and began filling that one intermittently as well. Unfortunately, as university finished and grown up life got a bit more cumbersome, creating art in my journal fell by the wayside.

I absolutely love looking back in these books and I’m still a bit sad that I didn’t keep it up. It provides such a big window in to what my life was like back then – like most diaries I suppose it just highlights how much we change. Having said that, although I want to continue and kick-start my art journaling again, it’s another one of those many hobbies for me that gets pushed to the back. Scrapbooking has come to the forefront and I suppose I don’t make time for both. As well as that fact, they are two very different styles and I think I’ve become more nervous to do the art journal again. In one way it should be easier – less to think about it, it doesn’t need photos or even journaling if I don’t want it, in my mind it can be less neat and more scrappy than my traditional 12x12 scrapbook. Despite this, I just don’t know where to start.

I’m not sure why I am, but I need to stop being scared to create a ‘good’ page, because that’s not what my art journal is about. Really, it’s about documenting my thoughts and worries, things that wouldn’t get documented in my other journals or scrapbooks. A lot of the pages are extremely personal and for that reason I haven’t photographed them – just as well really or this would be a very long post! I’ve shared quite a few photos though, and these are from the larger A5 journal I mentioned earlier. Hopefully it will give you some inspiration if you’re looking to start a mixed media art journal, even looking back through my pages gets me more eager to ignore my worries and just get making in mine too.

Please leave links if you've shared your art journal pages on your blog, I absolutely love finding new inspiration :)