Dear adult, if your days feel like constant chaos, full of tasks and endless to-dos, I feel you. Our joy and energy can easily get buried under endless responsibilities. Yet we still have to fight, using art, and creativity, to free our souls!
Art journaling is a strong tool that offers a gentle way to express and reclaim your sparkle. It helps you balance that creative sense when you have little energy and time. Moreover, it invites you to understand yourself and slow down.
Today, you will learn about the magic of art journaling and how to use it for your benefit. We will explain why and how you can implement art in your journals and start your journey. So stick around!
About the Author: Noha
Noha is an engineering student from Morocco who has a love for reading and journaling. Noha Writes is a beautiful combination of things she loves and different hobbies that have shaped her life over the years. Noha’s blog is made for creative souls, those who fall in love with ink on paper, those who dedicate hours to a piece of art, those who see beauty in creativity. You can check out her blog at Noha Writes and follow her on Instagram @noha.posts.
What is Art Journaling?
Unlike traditional journals, art journaling combines art and words to express thoughts and feelings. It is a free-form technique that allows you to use your creativity the way you want and prefer.
Depending on your artistic preferences, you can use the skills you have to embellish your pages and even follow a specific art journaling style, from which I mention:
Calligraphy: for those who love lettering and beautifully writing words. You don’t need fancy pens or advanced skills; you only need simple markers or brush pens and a personal touch in your lettering.
Collage: All about adding multiple paper pieces, images, or magazines to create layers. This unleashes your creativity with color coordination and space management; no matter what order you take, it turns adorable.
Drawing: If you are good at drawing, doodling, or sketching, turning a journal page into a drawing would be it. Those who are too busy to draw full albums but still enjoy practicing that hobby can combine it with words and join it in the art journal.
And the list goes on and on with so many more. As a beginner, you can start with those, and with practice, you discover your style.
Why You Should Start an Art Journal?
Journaling in general is a very powerful tool for many life aspects. Bullet journaling organizes your time and achievements. Brain dumps help you understand your messy thoughts and feelings.
Then artistic journaling comes to let out your creative energy and express yourself unlimitedly.
Here are some benefits of art journaling that I, personally, experience and relate to:
Art journaling allows you to express yourself:
Combining words and visuals, art journaling allows you to express yourself beyond language alone. It opens a big library of tools and techniques like photos, colors, titles, and doodles to showcase how you feel exactly how you imagine.
Our imagination is so good at viewing feelings in shapes and colors, and each moment of those reflects you and your inner world. So what’s better than having the chance to visualize your brain on paper and understand your emotions without necessarily putting them into words?
It provides personal, uninterrupted time:
In a fast-paced world, we all need uninterrupted time away from the chaos. We have to disconnect for a while and find our inner peace in a safe place.
For instance, mothers often get caught up in the demands of parenting, sometimes losing sight of their own needs. While motherhood is a beautiful worthy experience, you deserve moments for you, too.
Whether you’re a mom or anyone juggling life’s many roles, art journaling allows you to step aside and give yourself that needed time.
Picture a calm desk under a warm light, with your journal, pens, and beautiful stationery aligned. You sit there for an hour, taken away from all other thoughts, journaling and doodling only for fun and joy!
Enhances mental clarity and self-understanding:
Mental health is a crucial aspect that decides the quality of our lives. It must be a priority to take care of and nourish, and art journaling is effective.
Mental clarity is becoming a hard token in today’s distracted world, and if we do not stay aware of it we may lose it in the details of our days. Art journaling gives you that space to clear your mind and focus on yourself. It helps you understand your emotions, process them, capture the moments, and reflect. All those actions do nothing but enhance mental clarity and mindfulness.
Art journaling and stress relief:
Building on all the benefits we mentioned, art journaling also helps you manage your stress and anxiety.
It combines creativity, mindfulness, slow personal time, and all the essentials for stress relief and calm. The process is flexible and follows no rules. So you are free to experiment without any pressure, which nurtures the feeling of safety and calmness.
As someone who stresses a lot, journaling is always my go-to refuge, and I mean it. I find myself running to my corner with my utensils. A bunch of colored papers, washi tapes, and pens to decorate my journal by combining some words and shapes that only I understand to calm down and de-stress. It works like magic because it helps you release built-up negativity effortlessly and treat stress easily with the lowest damage.
Art Journaling Examples and Ideas You Can Try
Now that we know the fundamentals and understand the importance of art journaling, it is time to be practical.
To make it easy, I gathered these examples that you can copy and apply in your journals. They are diversified and flexible to fit your style and vibe:
Pages about the season or current events:
You can print photos and draw doodles of special events happening in your life. Whether it’s a vacation, a family gathering, or you got a new pair of shoes! Celebrating your wins and memories through art journaling is satisfying and so helpful. You keep the memories alive and enjoy your time reflecting on them all at once.
Start a mini journal:
Oh how much I love this idea! Starting a mini journal can be the next step to implementing art journaling in your routine. It’s tiny, cute, adorable, and fun. It is also easy to deal with and makes the perfect pieces of art that are satisfying and aesthetically pleasing!
Here are some pictures from my own mini journal. I make sure to add a new page at least once a month and now I have a good collection that I love to watch and talk about.
Make themed pages about what you love:
If you are a fan of coffee, then what’s better than a coffee-themed page right? Or your favorite book, a favorite show, or even a theme of colors.
The internet is a huge source of inspiration and it has enough to help you find your ideas. Be sure that people already thought of making coffee-themed journal pages and shared them online for you to look at and try! I always love emphasizing internet usage to inspire, exactly like what we are doing now, and you should try it too.
Try collages and quotes:
For the days you want to journal but are running out of ideas, try collages with any paper you have and quotes from people you love.
Throughout the years, I gained the habit of collecting papers from school, restaurants, shopping, magazines, old books, and so on. I always have a collection of random papers next to my stickers and they come in handy very often. I start by layering the page, then adding a quote with calligraphy and lettering to make it match, and ta-da: your creative page is done!
In short, art journaling is magical and worth having a place in our daily busy schedules. It combines personal time, self-care, creativity, and therapy all in one.
Together, we explored ways to use creativity to reconnect with ourselves and face the world with renewed energy through journaling techniques. I hope it helped you grasp the magic and get your dose of inspiration.
Now, unleash the artist in you and get going with your journey!
