Designing Pages

Often, I don't start out to design a page...it just evolves.  That's the case with these two recent entries.

I was feeling tense and anxious and needed to dump my anxiety someplace...so I just wrote those feelings out.  I chose water-soluble ink for the page on the left, and the next day when I was feeling much better, I washed over the words with clear water.  It reminded me of storm clouds--rather apropos!

I added diagonal streaks of rain and a bit of extra watercolor to obscure some of the words, then added the descriptive caption at the bottom of the page!

I'd gotten some grease on the page on the right--NO idea how--so I wasn't sure about taking the chance with an actual image or anything I might care about.  I decided that was the perfect time to practice my brush lettering!  I just filled the page with all shapes and sizes...fun, and I am learning a little more control.

Maintaining Privacy when you want to

There are a lot of ways to do this--Hannah Hinchman, whose interview will appear later in this series, once recommended writing very, very small--I believe that was in her first book, A Life In Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal, still my favorite book on journaling techniques.

Liz Steel, who was interviewed HERE, sometimes glues a flap over a private bit, that way she can lift it if she wants and do more journaling right on the flap.

I used a paper CD envelope in one of my journals, as you see above.  I glued it down by the flap, so I could put things I wanted to see in the envelope; it will still open by folding it to the right, allowing me to maintain a bit of privacy if I wish and store favorite pieces of ephemera while I'm at it.

One of my students wrote her feelings out in all directions on the page, overlapping lines so eventually there was no way you could read them.  It was beneficial for her to use her journal to purge negative feelings, but she didn't necessarily even want to be able to read them later, herself.

I gave it a shot when I was frustrated with dealing with bureaucracy and it made an interesting page!

You can collage or paint over a whole page, if you really just needed to get it out of your system but would prefer not to preserve it for posterity.

Or you can photograph your pages and play around with blur or the soft focus in your photo-editing software as I did on the rainy image above, too...everyone has cranky days!

PLEASE, feel free to add your favorite ideas in the comments here!