Art Journal Every Day: Beginning a New Journal

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

In the middle of October I started a new journal.  (And yes, I will be offering an online class in 2014 that shows you exactly how I make these junque journals, as well as one on exactly how I work in my journals - yay!)

For some reason, I always have trouble with the first few pages of a new journal.  I'm not sure why, but I do.  Is it the new-ness?  Is it the lack of accumulated stuff?  Is it some kind of weird internal pressure?  I don't know.  I wish I could figure it out and fix it, but for now it's a reality.  So that said, here are the first few (awkward) pages in my journal:

Fancy lettering makes me happy!

 This big word was cut using the ScanNCut (I scanned in my handwriting and then cut it out) and then pasted into my journal.  I added the orange stripes with a marker.

I'm a fan of creating patterns with very simple shapes.  This is one of my standard go-to patterns -- circles and diamonds.

I tried out a new pen in my journal called a Fude Ball 1.5 and I used it to create the lettering you see.  

This journal was created with several pages that are smaller than the regular sized ones in the rest of the journal.

Inside the face is some a sample I created for a video -- using stencils with watercolor -- but it found a happy home in my art journal!

 I used hand carved banner stamps with the month, the day, and the year on them.

I like to bring together disparate parts of my journal by using pattern.  I tried to use the white crosses to bring together the two halves of the journal spread.

I added some color and a white shadow to my Happy Halloween stamp!

So there you have it -- a peek at the first few tough going pages.  It can only get better from here, right?!

Here is this week's linky list:

Thanks for stopping by!