The second stop on our Artful Adventure into Art Journaling is learning how to recycle a book into an art journal.

Not only is it economical, it’s a very “green” thing to do! Read, watch, or do both! It’s up to you!  You can find the first episode here.

We have a thrift store nearby that always has an excellent selection of books, and I periodically stop in to see what there is to choose from. For this episode I stopped by and found a fun book by Erma Bombeck. I always loved her column and her take on looking at life with humor. The book was only 99 cents, and was a pink tag item. Pink tag items were half off today! So I picked up a hard back book for 50 cents. However, as I began to flip through the book, I decided I would rather read it before I turned it into an art journal. Yes, this is problem you may have when selecting books that you don’t own.  You may decide you want to read it first, and then you have to select something else.  I found another one that was a similar size and that I could live with taking it home to turn into a journal today! Actually, I think I read that book before! No wonder I didn’t mind turning it into a journal!

After you select your book, you need gesso.  That’s it!  If you want to use a brush or a sponge applicator, you may. However, I will warn you now, you will have to clean them!  So, I just prefer to use my hands to spread the gesso.  I use a liquid gesso, and it makes it so easy to smooth onto the pages.

Before you start applying gesso, you’ll want to thin your book down.  As you work through your art journal, you’ll be adding layers of paint, paper, and who knows what else!  So you’ll want to thin out some pages so there is actually room for your art journal pages to live within the covers, and still have a chance of closing it.

As you look through your book, there may be pages you want to keep free of gesso, and leave in the book.  That way, you can have some text backgrounds, or some titles or phrases peeking through that really “speak” to you.  You don’t have to, it’s just an idea. Again, I remind you, there is not a right or wrong way to art journal!

Now, you are ready to start weeding out pages and thinning down your book.Leave a few pages, and then take out 3 or 4. You can carefully tear them out, or use an craft knife to cut close to inside edge of the page.  Keep the ones you remove to use for text pages in your journal or for other projects.  Just repeat the process until you have made your way through the book.

Next, pour a little gesso on an open spread of 2 pages, and just smooth it out with your hand, brush, or applicator. Leave it open until it is dry. You may need to hold it open by clipping a bit of the edge with a clothes pin, tiny clamp, or binder clip. If you are in a hurry, you may like to use a heat tool to dry it.

You can take the bit that is left on your hand and smear it onto the next page, and it will act as adhesive and you can adhere two or three pages together to give more strength to the page.

That’s it! Acrylic gesso cleans up with water, so just clean up your hands or brushes with water!

The next stop on this art journaling journey will cover different adhesives we can use in our art journal for decoupage, collage techniques, or just sealing things down.  So stay on board, I’m sure you’ll want to know about them!

Oh, we’d love to have you show or tell us about your journal you create with this method! Feel free to connect in the comments, or over at the Artful Adventures Facebook group!

Until our next stop,