Your Art Journal

Creating your Art Journal

Try starting an art journal of your own. You can use:

a notebook
sketch pad
plain or lined hardcover journal
loose pages in a binder
if you know how, or know someone who knows how to bind books, make your own journal
a large folder or a box to contain larger, 3-D items

Keep your own notes, sketches, and cuttings from newspapers, magazines, or catalogs to show what you consider to be good and bad design and the reasons for your choices. The style, color(s), design of each page can be used to reflect mood/emotions (eg: blue for sadness, red for anger, etc.), various materials can be glued in and layered. Basically, it is your journal so just do anything that pleases you!

Your personal art journal can become the first stage in developing an art portfolio. Creating an art journal gives you an opportunity to explore and develop a collection of images, projects, pictures, postcards, diagrams, or sketches that represent your design ideas.
If you wish, the journal may be set up with sections or categories of work; for example, thumbnail sketches, design ideas, two-dimensional (2-D) design work, photographs of three-dimensional (3-D) design work, design projects, drafting applications, and multimedia applications. You can design categories to meet your needs, or set up the design journal sequentially in a scrapbook, where you just keep adding ideas and work without having categories.

You can continue to add to your journal each year. As an expression of yourself it will become a record of your opinions, thoughts, and artistic development over time. For the purposes of this course, select your best ideas from the journal as the starting point for projects that will be put into your art portfolio.

(For further inspiration you may want to obtain a copy of "1000 Artist Journal Pages - Personal Pages and Inspirations" by Dawn DevRies Sokol. ISBN-10:1-59253-412-0)