Art Journal Flip: Dream, Create, Play

Have I got a treat for you!

At long last, I’ve finally managed to get a setup so that I could successfully film a flip-through of my first art journal.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, however I kept running into road blocks.

The first time I attempted to film one, I didn’t have a tripod, so I held my phone in my right hand while I attempted to flip through the journal with my left. Needless to say, it was very clunky and shaky and I wasn’t happy with it. I also had not yet completed the cover design, so it didn’t feel right to consider publishing the video without the journal being complete from cover-to-cover, literally.

Second go around, I finally purchased a tripod. But darn it, no holder attachment for my iPhone. No biggie. I’ll try using my old Canon camera’s video.

Ugh! Awful!! The quality was horrible since the camera is so old. The film was grainy and pixelated. I did not want that to represent my art to the world.

Third time’s the charm!

I ordered and finally received an iPhone attachment for my tripod, and at long last, I was able to film a high-quality, non-shaky video of my first art journal. Hooray!

I love watching art journal-flips. Probably because I get saturated with a lot of ideas all in one sitting.

I start the flip with a little tour of the cover design. I give the stack of bulky pages a little attention, as well. I can’t explain it, but I love seeing all the stacked, colorful, bulky pages of a closed art journal. It creates some mystery and I find I then want to poke around inside to see what’s creating all the riot of colors.

Once I open it up, you’ll see at the beginning of the journal that the art is very sparse. This was back when I was doing some half-hearted doodling and sketches in it when I first got the journal back in 2008. You’ll even catch a glimpse of my early affinity for lettering.

Once we’re past that, however, we step into the real meat of the journal, which comprises of my works from June 2015 through July 2015 where I challenged myself to complete a single layout every day. I didn’t manage to get one in every day, but it was pretty close. And that exercise is what catapulted me in to my current love for art journaling and likely created the art beast I now have inside of me that demands to be “fed” with creativity.

Unfortunately, I completed this journal before I began my blog, so there may be some layouts you see in there that have never made it here with full how-to descriptions. At one point I did a little back-tracking and back-posted some of the layouts. But currently I have honestly forgotten all the steps I took in those earlier layouts, so their creation from start to finish shall have to remain a mystery.

I decided to go the route of just using music. No commentary. Not comfortable doing that just yet.

I have to next figure out how to get my Canson journal filmed. It’s much larger than this Moleskine journal, and my workstation doesn’t really have a lot of room to accommodate as I have it set up currently.

One video at a time for now.

I do hope you enjoy the little tour. Please let me know what you think.