Life Journal Workshop: The Art of Practice

Life Journal Workshop: The Art of Practice

In this week’s lesson of the life journal workshop, I want to talk about the art of practice. Every great writer will tell that if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Now obviously, the life journal workshop I am creating for SheisDallas.com is about more than just writing, it’s also about art, creativity and self-care. At the core of the journaling process is experimentation, self-discovery and play!

Using Collage in your Life Journal

The words in the image above were clipped from a magazine article over a year ago: innovation, inspiration and imagination. I loved the font and the merging of these three words. To me, this is the what the art of practice is all about. The more time we allow ourselves to play in our life journal, the more these three words will take root in our psyche and our spirit, freeing us to be our creative selves. All human beings are creative at their core, sometimes we just have to remember how to be creative. This was one of my favorite pages, that came together over a few days. I love the bright colors and the sparkle of the glitter plus the use of collage to create texture and add depth. The two pages on the sides are backgrounds I created. All of these pages were made in a spirit of practice. They had no goal, no purpose other than the joy of creation. I created these journal pages when I was remembering how to be creative. I want to encourage you to make time to play. If you missed the last lesson in the life journal series on writing prompts, you can click here to read more or just search the site for “life journal”. Not all of my pages in my life journal are attractive and I often think they are not worth sharing. I make no claims to being a great artist.   At the same time, this forces me to remind myself that it’s all about the practice and not about whether you like my pages or not! The real purpose for the life journal is to remember how to be creative and to make time to play. Our spirit needs this from us. I feel so much better after an hour spent in my craft room.

Practicing Lettering Techniques in your Life Journal

For the last few weeks I have been obsessed with St. Francis of Assissi and The Peace Prayer. I have always loved St. Francis and singing his Peace Prayer is still a fond memory from my childhood as a Catholic school girl practicing our hymns on Friday afternoons. This happened to coincide with the International Day of Peace last week, so I decided to have fun with this topic in my journal. I started by just writing about peace and letting whatever thoughts occurred flow onto my page. Then I played with lettering of the word peace. I decided the white pages needed color and some decoration, so I started adding paint to the page. I used acrylics for this, with lots of water added. I like the intensity of acrylics and am more comfortable with this medium than I am with watercolor. Here you can see the work in progress. And here you can see the final product spread that I created around peace. I enjoyed playing, using some of my daughter’s sticker’s to add color to the page and hide a few mistakes. I printed the dove from an image online and added paint and glitter to it. I love glitter, have I told you that? I adore glitter! A girl can never have too much bling in her life. Playing with lettering was fun, too. I love the magazine Cloth, Paper, Scissors and last week they had a free e-book on lettering that motivated me to try my hand at it. Then, finally, on this page, I found myself just playing with layering, texturing and using up the leftover pink and purple paint I had poured out. I am still trying to figure out my signature style with the art journaling. I like the writing part the best, probably because it is easiest for me. So your homework for this week is to practice. Commit to 15 minutes each day of creative play: that could be writing, painting, collage or coloring with crayons. It doesn’t matter. Allow the blank page to guide you. If you feel stuck, start with creating a collage of magazine images and words. Spend time one day selecting images, the next day trimming them, the next day arranging them, etc. so that at the end of the week you will have a page that says something about you. Once the collage is complete, spend 15 minutes writing about the collage. I will do this, too and share mine on the Facebook page next week. Want to share what you are working on? Or if you have questions, want to see more resources or more of what I am working on,   come join us on Facebook.