Handmade Journal

free tutorial:

make your own art journal!

Art journaling has become an incredibly important part of my creative process. Making it a practice has made me grow in new ways and it is a constant source of inspiration for my art. But believe it or not, it had been years of dreaming and wishing before I actually started my art journal (meaning: years of resistance and procrastination!)

One of my best excuses was that I couldn't find a journal that really suited me (and my perfectionist tendencies) Basically, a journal made of nice thick paper (think watercolor) that would open flat from the first page to the last.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”

— Pablo Picasso

make your own art journal!

Thankfully, one very late and gloomy autumn evening, something inside of me said: "Enough! Just grab some paper and make it happen!" I looked around the studio and found an A3 pad of paper (not exactly watercolor but close enough) and just started tearing out all the sheets and folding them in two. There you go: pages! Then I bound the book with thread and it became my art journal, the one I still create in today. And I LOVE it to bits.

Making the journal myself, putting my hands to work, is actually what got me unstuck and made me start the practice. There is something so rewarding about creating your own journal. Mine is full of imperfections, which is... perfect! This way I don't feel precious about it and can get as messy as I wish.

Talking about this with my students, I realized I was not the only one who got stuck in this "quest" for the perfect journal. So I decided to make a video tutorial to share the process!

Many students have shared with me the journals they've created with this simple technique and I can hardly say how excited I feel for them! Like it's the beginning of a love story... I can't wait to see the beautiful mess they will create on those simple white pages.

tell me!

Do you keep an art journal? Or would you like to? Have you thought about making your journal yourself? If you give the tutorial a try, I'd love to see!

Please share your thoughts and questions in a comment below, and if you’d like to art journal with me, check out my online class The Artist & the Journal! I’d love to share this adventure with you.