Seven Art Journal Ideas to Inspire You
A sketchbook practice elevates your art!
In the creative journey, your art journal is your best friend.
For years I resisted keeping a creative journal or developing my ideas in a sketchbook. I felt my time was better spent working directly on my paintings. However, all that has changed. More and more I’m finding what a valuable companion an art journal actually is.
There are many things you can do with a creative diary. I share seven ways that I use my journal to inspire your own painting process. There’s also a special artist that I want you to meet. Check out my interview with Deryn Abrahams below. We talk about the benefits of having a sketchbook practice and how it informs the creative process. Scroll down for more!
Idea 1 - Use your art journal to record your colour mixes.
Do you ever find you wish you could remember how you mixed a certain colour? This used to happen to me all the time. I would start working on a painting and then travel, or take a break from it and start working on something else. When inspiration struck and I was inspired to work on it again with renewed energy I would waste a lot of time trying to remember how I came up with a particular hue.
These days, I always keep a sketchbook close at hand while I am painting. I use it to make notes and record the colours I used to produce a certain shade of blue, green or any other colour that has found its way into my artwork. As soon as I mix a shade that inspires me, I add a small swatch of it in my journal. This is super helpful and will help expand your colour repertoire.
It’s also a great way to track your colour choices over time. It’s a good idea to put a date on each page you fill. Having a visual record of your colour palette over time, helps you see at a glance how you mature as an artist.
Idea 2 - Explore Different Colour Combinations
Painting regularly is important. It flexes and stretches your creative muscles and helps you develop your artistic skills. However, there are days when you don’t know what to work on or where to start. Staring at a blank canvas can feel a little challenging at times.
This is when keeping an art journal can come in handy. You can use it simply to explore colour combinations that perhaps you have never used before. In the spread below, I experimented with the two complementary colours, orange and blue.
When you paint for the sheer love of it, without the pressure of needing to produce a ‘masterpiece’, you begin tuning into your inner wisdom and following the cues from your internal guide. Exciting things begin to surface. Remember, no one needs to see your art journal. What emerges might excite you and take you on an unexpected creative detour. It might lead to a new collection of paintings!
Idea 3 - Record Impressions from your Travels
Taking creative breaks is essential for us creatives. Time away from the art studio renews your energy and expands your perspective in fortuitous ways. When on holiday your usual routine is disrupted. This helps you to relax and soak in your new surroundings, which is so very refreshing.
Having a sketchbook to make rough sketches and take notes of your experience in the moment in this magical location can inspire a whole new body of work once back in your studio. The page in my journal below emerged from a trip to the simply stunning desert of Wadi Rum in southern Jordan.
Bring back something meaningful from your travels that will help you relive the memorable moments you spent in faraway lands. This could be as simple as some driftwood with an intriguing shape, twigs, feathers or pebbles collected from the sand dunes. Create a small alter for your object and allow it to carry you back to that wondrous place and all the feelings that came with it. Your art will capture the essence of those incredible sensations and memories.
Idea 4 - Paint with Abandon
Your creative journal is your playing field. This is where you get to experiment with different mark making tools as well as explore new patterns, lines and textures.
What is wonderful about these pages is that you can keep adding to them until something emerges that you are really happy with. Incorporate shapes that you haven’t tried before. Contrast heavily textured opaque areas with more transparent washes of colour.
The idea is to surrender to the painting process with no inhibition. You can always paint over what doesn’t resonate for you!
Idea 5 - Work Out a Colour Palette for a New Painting Series
You may know what you want to paint and are raring to go, but your colour palette needs to be considered carefully. Your journal can help you work out your hues and keep a record of them in one place so that you can refer back to them as you begin working on your new collection.
Balancing saturated colour that comes straight out of a paint tube with more muted desaturated hues will add depth and sophistication to your art and is so much more pleasing to the eye.
It is extremely useful to keep track of colour combinations. Your sketchbook becomes an invaluable reference for you as you travel down the creative path and develop your skills as an artist. You may return to them in the future. Perhaps for your next collection, you decide to focus on 3-5 different hues from the palette that you previously came up with, but this time you choose more muted neutral hues. Every painting you create informs the next one.
Idea 6 - Stretch Your Creative Horizon
If we are not mindful, we tend to make art on autopilot. We end up using the same painting tools, creating similar brushstrokes, shapes, patterns and lines. Our colour palette also tends to get overused in our paintings. We hold onto old ways of approaching our art because it feels familiar and safe.
Most likely your current work has attracted an audience, who will happily buy your paintings. You subconsciously fear you will lose your admiring followers if you follow your inner whispers and start painting in a different way.
It may be that you feel you need to fit into a certain genre of art. Maybe you’ve been invested in realism, painting perfect portraits for a long time and it’s too disconcerting to approach your subject matter in a more abstract way.
This is where your art journal becomes invaluable. It could be that you still love painting portraits or landscapes but want to start painting them in a way that affords you more freedom. Perhaps photo realism is no longer your thing and what you really want to do is to convey your experience of a place rather than a true likeness of the location. Your sketchbook allows you to try things out and experiment before you share your work with the world.
Whatever the reason, trust your inner guide and allow whatever wants to emerge to spill out and fill the pages of your journal. This is how you can blossom as a budding artist and reveal and share all the amazing things you have to offer the world.
Idea 7 - A Sacred Space to Explore Your Inner Terrain
Many people keep a diary, which is a great way to work out problems, brainstorm as well as keep track of memories, events and even significant dreams. However, for us visuals, assimilating our words into our art is so much more powerful.
The act of clearly writing what is weighing you down is a liberating exercise in and of itself. However, what you need to convey may be too private to share with your nearest and dearest, let alone the rest of the world. You need a safe space to freely explore whatever is on your mind, knowing that once you see it written down, you can always paint over it.
The painting process is certainly cathartic and you never know what will emerge as you honestly express yourself in your art journal. Serendipitous insights might emerge that help you unravel with colour and paint whatever it is that is weighing you down.
Art journalling is Very Healing!
I hope this inspires you to start a creative sketchbook practice. Trust your inner knowing.and express your deepest thoughts and dreams fully in your art journal. If you feel called to dig a little deeper and are craving more one to one guidance, you may enjoy The Align Sessions, exploring creativity through the healing power of homeopathy. Find out more by clicking below.
Make the most of this powerful process and enjoy creating!
Sara xo
New Painting
Reflections In Green - mixed media abstract painting on panel
Quote of the month
" Journaling is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.”
(Mina Murray)
I’m thrilled to introduce you to a very special guest artist, Deryn Abrahams works from her home studio at the foot of Mont Blanc in the French Alps. She graduated in 1993 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art where she was awarded for an outstanding student final show. This was proceeded by a PGCE in Art and Design and a successful career in teaching for many years before emigrating to France with her family in 2005. While raising a family, she started to logistically support mountain guides, climbers and skiers and her love for the mountains grew deeper. While living in the mountains, she has always kept up a sketchbook practice but it was not until her two children started their own life adventures that the opportunity to go back to her artistic roots and develop as an artist presented itself. Inspiration comes from the Alpine landscape; the ever-changing mountain narrative. Immersed physically and emotionally in the environment, she creates pieces which brings the outside inside; translating the places, the moments, the weather and the light of the Chamonix valley to a series of mixed-media, semi-abstract works. Capturing the joy and deep connection to nature in beautiful painting, collage and photography. We can all slow down when we notice how rocks have been weathered over millennia, or how our local environment changes with the seasons; we are both on our own journey and part of the journey of the world. Bringing these feelings and that element of discovery into her work produces pieces which invite reflection and joy. The paintings embody a simple life, one where we have time to observe and imagine; or just be in the present moment. Over the last few years, Deryn has been selling locally and internationally and is currently working on a new series to be released in June 2022. She shares her process regularly on Instagram (@derynabrahams_art)
Hi Deryn can you tell us a little about how you got into painting?
It was a natural progression from the mix-media drawing studies I was creating while finding my way back into a studio practice after taking such a long break and taking part in the Creative Visionary Program with Nicholas Wilton.
What inspires your creative process?
Curiosity; what will happen if I, how did they do that and how do I mix that colour? Being engrossed in discovery, experimentation and learning. The constant challenge of translating the feeling I am feeling onto paper. The magic of something developing and emerging from a blank canvas or board. Feeling of potential before you start and not worrying in the messy middle; seeing it as wonderful history of the search for something through layers of paint on the journey.
What is it about your subject matter that appeals to you?
I am really privileged to be able to live in the Alps and it constantly offers a unique, wild, raw landscape that captures your heart. Through hiking, climbing and creative work, I feel a connection to the ever-changing landscape; the time of day, the weather, the different seasons. This contact with the elements can energise or calm you – the wind in your hair, the sun on your face, even cold hands from sketching too long.
Your photography is amazing, how does that tie into your creative practice?
Photography has always been part of my creative practice. At University it was the medium with which I expressed my ideas resulting in a series of large-scale night images of the Cumbrian landscape. Nowadays, I find it invaluable for capturing moments in the landscape, to support sketchbook studies and inspire paintings in the studio. Currently, I am taking a photo everyday of the sky from our balcony for ‘The 100 Day Project’ (#100daysofweatherwatching) which is now the inspiration for a new body of work I am working on. The wonder of a smart phone means you can always have a camera with you and the processing apps today are amazing, a portable darkroom in your pocket! In the summer months I have been also exploring an alternative photographic printing process which uses two chemicals and sunlight to produce an image, Cyanotypes. Photography crossing into painting when applying the photosensitive solution, it relies upon.
I love following your sketchbook posts on Instagram. What in your view are the benefits of starting a sketchbook practice?
It’s a fabulous place to be yourself! To follow your curiosity and experiment without the pressure of an end result. A portable studio. A place for everything; resources, composition ideas, colour mixing & palettes, artist research, value studies, studio log, notes, thoughts and reflections.
How does having a sketchbook practice inform your painting?
For me, it is integral to the whole process of creating. It can be the inspiration and starting point, a place to try things out during the messy middle stage in the search for feelings, marks, colours and happy accidents and finally a place to reflect on your creative process.
What tips can you give our readers who would like to start working in their sketchbooks?
Don’t be precious, if it you don’t like a page move on, you can always collage or paint over it.
Take it with you everywhere.
Experiment with different media, different processes & even where you like to work.
I love to mask off the edges of the picture shape I am working with because I am so messy and like the contrast of clean edges with contained chaos.
If you feel constrained by the page why not work on loose sheets and then collage them into your pages. There are so many exciting ways to use a sketchbook!
What informs your colour palette?
Anything that catches my eye and makes me go ooh. The incredible colours in the world around us, ever-changing skies, magazines, old posters, weathered paint, new discoveries when colour mixing and a love for art history, the work other artists that I am drawn to.
What are your 3 most important art supplies?
My sketchbook
A much-abused household paintbrush
Dental tools, it’s as much about removing paint as adding it.
Any advice for people who would like to begin painting but are put off by the belief that they are not ‘creative’?
Start with a sketchbook and create a collection of things you are drawn too, marks, colours, shapes, subject matter, paintings, sculptures, skies for inspiration. Spend time just mixing colours and seeing which combinations you like. Start small and paint often this will give you confidence and experience working through the whole process from start to finish. Follow your curiosity and enjoy the process. The journey will lead you to your destination.
Anything else that you would like to add?
Why not do a course, it’s always fun learning with others and there are plenty of great courses out there! Feel free to get in touch if you would like to ask anything else via my Instagram @derynabrahams_art
Find out more about Deryn.
