I spent the Summer Solstice running errands in town on a very hot day, having left my purse at home. I had to answer about 200 questions at the bank to get £10 out, but the woman was very nice about it and very helpful. The stress of running town errands on a 28 degree day called for an iced coffee concoction and some journaling time to cool off (Costa has air conditioning – yay!)

This is what happened…

'Summer Solstice' 8x5" art journal page, 2010 Klair Scattergood

Another change of style? Oh yes.

I touched on this in my interview last night with Blade over on The Artistic Biker’s U-Stream show. If you’re not familiar with Blade’s show and you enjoy art journaling you should check it out. The shows are recorded so you don’t have to watch them in real time. They’re not how-to shows, they’re more working shows. He uses a different technique each week and shows you what he’s doing as well as answering questions from the chat room and updating what’s happening in the art & art journaling world.

One of the things we discussed was organic journaling. Not just on one page, but in the life of your journals full stop. Truth is, I rarely do the same thing for any length of time because I get bored. Art journaling is not about doing what everyone else does or using specific techniques. It’s about doing what feels right today. Back in May I was thinking I wanted to do more painting and sketching in my journal, so I have a 40 page journal on watercolour paper that is full of paintings. But then I had to work on paintings for a gallery show and when I’m done with a 10 hour day of painting the very last thing I want to do is paint in my journal! So I went back to basics and returned to my illustration roots. My current book is all about the pens and collage.

This page is just a simple illustration with a Pilot g-tec c4 ultra fine sepia ball pen. That’s it. No fancy stuff, no paints, no gesso. For this entire page I used a pencil & eraser (for the initial sketch), the sepia pen for the colour and an ordinary Fine point crystal orange Bic Biro for the writing. No need for an outside journaling supply kit, in fact I didn’t even need a pencil case really, I could have just shoved the bits in a pocket of my bag.

Like Blade said last night, you can do whatever you want in your journal and “no one can tell you that it’s not good because it’s not theirs.” Once you get past your own judgements about what you think of your pages and decide that it’s OK if you have a page of paints, then collage, then writing, then a pencil sketch, then some scrap that you scribbled out and then another collage page, you will start to enjoy the process a lot more.

That’s the central point of all my workshops that I try my best to get across to everyone; do what you want to do today and forget having a style or a technique or a single way of doing things. It will open up a whole new world of possibilities in your art journaling.