Whether you are new to art journaling or an experienced pro, you’ll want to be sure that The Documented Life Project is on your radar. 2014 is the first year this project took place. It was headed up by a group of the five women who make up the Art to the Fifth Academy; Lorraine Bell, Sandi Keene, Rae Missigman, Barbara Moore, and Roben-Marie Smith.
The project was free and was designed as part planner, part art journal. Most people used Moleskine journals. A prompt was issued each week and these five women shared their take on the prompt. A Facebook group was started and by the end of this year, it had grown to over 7,700 members! People shared photos of their pages and the inspiration and comradery was phenomenal!
The good news is that there will be a new project for 2015!
An art journal calendar is a fun way to just make a few note about your daily life, and this style is great if you are just dipping your toes into the world of daily journaling. A great feature of creating your own pages is the fact that you can start anytime. If you didn’t start in January, no problem! You don’t have a pre-made book with dates that are just empty. (If you did use a pre-dated item, you could always just fill in the previous pages with other stuff — notes, ideas, sketches — it’s all good!)
It’s been kind of hard to get into a spring mindset, with all the snow that kept showing up in April. I felt like where I went, there it snowed! This page kind of represents a spring morning, the dawn of a new season! Even with the threat of snow as I was making this page, and my daughter coming in to tell me that she was standing outside and watched a light rain turn into snowflakes, I was still determined to make a spring page for May.
Here’s the way the page came together:
Large letters were used to create a mask for the word May.
I used pastels to create the background.
Then I blended and played with the color to make my version of early morning.
I decided I didn’t want to cover the background I had so much fun creating, so I used a piece of lightweight cardboard from the back of a tablet of paper and made a flower template with my Big Shot and a flower die.
Tracing around the flower die, I left a few running off the edge of the paper, and made some close enough together to make them look like there are some behind others.
Day numbers were added at the edges of the flower shapes.
Some doodles were added here and there.
A border was doodled around the entire border.
That was it! I think as the month goes on, I will be able to add more doodling and other embellishments as it becomes clear which days have more written in them. We’ll see how that goes.
