How Mixed Media Collage Journaling Books & Classes Freed My Creative Spirit

As I prepare for my second show of journal pages next month, I’m anxious to share my discovery of journaling with you.  In 2003, when I found myself depressed with life and art, I turned to Julia Cameron’s book: The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity for guidance.  Among many useful strategies discussed to combat the artist’s blues, was journaling.  For the past 7 years I’ve been recording my thoughts in a journal, on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and found it very helpful.  Eventually I felt keeping a written journal wasn’t enough; I wanted to create a visual one.  I soon found an invaluable source of information and inspiration in Gwen Diehn’s: The Decorated Page which revealed a variety of ways visual journals could be designed.  I began creating visual journals to experiment with collage and mixed media techniques.  While this was fun, what I really wished for was to create pages that spoke about the heart of my life experiences.  Feeling the need for a real live teacher, in 2007 I registered for Juliana Coles’ Extreme Journaling Workshops at Art Unravelled in Phoenix, AZ.  I was seduced by her expressive emotional journaling style.  I quickly found out when Juliana meant extreme, she meant extreme!  Timing our every step through the process of creating multi-layered pages with all sorts of mediums, she forced us to act immediately and viscerally to fill our pages with every conceivable material.  Never sitting idle or lost in indecision we practiced, practiced, and practiced layering our pages with colours, textures, words and patterns, while maintaining a wild sense of experimentation and developing the ability to leap into the unknown fearlessly!  Juliana’s methods of making journal pages opened up my sense of creativity to levels I had never imagined before.  At Art Unravelled the journals of another artist also caught my eye.  Kelly Kilmer’s sweet and sassy pages called out to me to recover the sense of play with materials I had as a kid.  Working with papers, pencil crayons, stickers and markers of all kinds, I was drawn to Kelly’s skilful use of colour, pattern, texture; her awesome sense of layout and design as well as her honest journaling style.  A few years later when she was offering courses on-line, I was eager to learn her techniques for creating fabulous journal pages.  One of the most important things her courses did for me was to kick start my ability to make art on a daily basis.  The other was to introduce me to an on-line community of fellow artists.  The support I received from these friends from the different parts of the world really boosted my creative spirit.  Through them I realized the power of nurturing each other’s talents and skills as well as sharing life experiences with others.