Two Art Journals At Once
During a recent trip to Richmond, Virginia, I hit up this old haunt: Plaza Art Materials, on Grace Street by VCU.
I didn't need anything in particular, but I hadn't been in the store in two years, so I enjoyed looking around.
A couple of tiny sketchbooks caught my attention, and weren't expensive. One was a spiral-bound book with heavy black paper (breaking my rule about spiral binding, but god I love black journal paper), and a cloth-bound book with ivory sheets.
The latter one was a 5”x5” Global Art Hand Book, produced by Speedball. I'd never really had such a small sketchbook or art journal before, and neither had I used a square one. But the paper felt so nice, I decided to give it a try.
When I got back home to the mountains, I laid all my art journals out to look at them. Three of these I've talked about — the other three are in a “future use” pile, that I swear won't grow to mountainous size this time.
(Missing are the sketchbooks from the early 2000s, and the art journal from 2014. Those were sadly lost in a move, and I'm glad I took photographs of the pages I made in them.)
Since it seems like I'm actually making a go of this art journal thing again, I gathered up all my art supplies and tried to organize them in my small room. My desk doesn't always look quite this messy when I'm making something, but it's close.
I made a few quick marks in the new small sketchbook, just to see how the paper worked with heavier things like paint and ink. No wrinkling at all, especially if I worked with the pages clamped down until everything was dry.
I tend to always come back to making that bastardized paisley on the right. It's filled the margins of notebooks since I was sixteen.
For this spread, I used an awesome image from a 1940s National Geographic magazine, of some dancers performing in Africa. It seemed a good spot to use the blue jay and dove feathers I'd found out near the feeders.
I try hard not to have more than one identical outlet for the same type of project, because I sometimes have a tendency to spread things too thin, then get discouraged.
But keeping a large art journal and a small one at the same time actually seems to help. It's easier to make a quick spread in a small journal. But a large journal offers more space to make a huge mess and experiment. Right now I need both.