Art Everyday: Art Journals for Cheap

You know I love blank books and notebooks -- the kind with no lines. The plainer the page, the better for me. Looking at a blank page and knowing I can do anything with it -- oh the giddiness of it all!

But blank journals (especially those Moleskine ones) are quite expensive and there is something to my frugal upbringing that squirms each time I try to buy one of those. The thought of slapping paint and paper and filling something with a price tag like that makes me squeamish.  So where do I get my blank book fix?

I make them - out of old books that no one wants to read.  Books that will most likely be tossed into the landfill and left to rot. Old books that cost about P25.00 each over at the second hand books bin. I like the thought of giving these babies a second life.

I do pick them carefully. I always choose the ones with a sewn binding, never the ones that are just glued to a hard spine.  These (the glued ones) tend to self-destruct within 10 seconds of the first application of gesso. The ones with the sewn binding last - well, forever. And they can withstand the tortures I put these books through.  It's also easier to cut out pages to make a thinner book -- the better to add bulky collage elements in.  The kind of book or what it's about also counts for me.  The one I am currently working on used to be a hardbound novel with the title "Point of Origin". I picked it because I felt that it went with what I was starting -- a new journey.

To turn it into a blank art journal, I first take the old, trusty glue stick and glue two or more pages together.  Old book pages can be very porous and gluing two or more pages together makes for a stronger, sturdier substrate that can take paint and water better without fraying or tearing.  Next, one of my favorite parts -- glopping on the gesso.  I love gessoing the pages.  The repetitive movement of brush gliding on the page is almost meditative (to me at least! LOL).  The pages look like this after two very thin coats:

Then it's time to work on the backgrounds.  I spend my weekday evenings working on backgrounds. I love putting on layers and glazes of paint on the page.  And sometimes, to add a little texture, I lay some sheer tissue paper on top of the painted page and crumple it a bit. Two background pages I made last week had that textured look I like.  I stamped them with my wooden stamps from India.

Here's a page with just a plain background (for now).  I still don't know what else I want to do with it

You can use a brush or even a clean kitchen sponge to apply paint.  I keep several cut-up kitchen sponges handy just in case I want to pounce the paint on.  Using a sponge can give you really cool effects and textures.    If you want to go for an antiqued look, you can stain your pages with tea or even coffee.  I sometimes use coffee grounds to do this -- just get some damp coffee grounds and smoosh them on the page.  Messy - yes. But it's fun -- it's play.

And that's what I was up to the past week.  After this post, I'll be going back to my work table to finish something I started over the week-end.  It was an experiment of sorts, just trying out a technique I saw while nosing around, but I like how it turned out.

And tomorrow -- I'm going to take a trip to the used books store to pick up a few more of my "artsy-fartsy journals" in the making.