Making art journals is definitely something I associate with a individual pages built up in a book - a place to celebrate your artwork - your thoughts - your ideas - your experiments and as such is not an art medium that I have embraced as I prefer my  makes to be more giftable. However over time I have come to realise that actually any form of artwork where you express yourself is indeed a form of art journalling and so today I have a quick blog post created using stamps designed by Lynne Moncrieff.

I have chosen to make my "journal" using the Craftyboard journal 8 x 4 inches and a limited colour palette so my mini artwork has a cohesive feel. Whilst I have shown a few pages here there are enough stamps in the Dried Botanicals Set 1 and Dried Botanicals Set 2 stamps for you to create a whole book full of different pages celebrating nature.

I started by deciding I would have alternate stamped pages and plain pages so that I can use my book for writing in if I chose to. To do this I added a mat of paper 7 3/4 by 5 3/4 inches from an old paper collection by 13 Arts called  On the Wall. I edged each of the papers and each Craftyboard page with one of the Distress Oxide inks I used through out the project.

For the front and back covers I added details to my background using Weathered Wood and Speckled Egg Distress Oxide inks with a mixture of first, second and third generation images. I added my most dominant layer using Stormy Sky Distress Oxide. I also added some stencilling using the dianthus mask. For the front cover I stamped the collage text stamp from set 1 with Stormy Sky ink onto smooth stamping card and cut out leaving a small border and then added a word stamp from the sets to give my book a title.

The inside pages were deliberately kept really simple - I chose a focal floral element and stamped that centrally before adding my chosen text. This time as well as using the text stamp to create a title I also by adding first, second and third generation stamping used the same words to build up my background.

I used all bar two, of the sheets of Craftyboard that come in the journal pack - decorating them in in a similar way building interest on a neutral paper background before adding the pages to the book rings that come in the pack.

If you are going to make something similar I would suggest choosing co-ordinating stamp sets and a limited colour palette as I have done here as this makes it easier to achieve a cohesive feel. 

I hope that this week I have shown you that just because a style of artwork has been given a title you really don't have to be constrained by that - by experimenting you can take a concept and make it truly yours - will I ever art journal in the way many do - the answer to that remains an emphatic no.  However, I will continue to mix my mediums and create minibooks that are functional whilst experimenting with the products I have in my stash and I would encourage you to do the same.