My New-Old Repurposed Art Journal

I began an experiment last week, repurposing an old art journal.

I have seen a few old books repurposed to be used as an art journal and have always thought it was very cool. I altered a board book years ago, but obviously a regular book is different again. Usually people glue the pages together in groups of 2-4, depending upon their thickness. All that gluing was making me hesitate.

As I was sitting at my computer desk, where I do most of my art journaling, when I noticed my old 2011 experimental journal that I never completed. Most of the pages are pretty plain. I was trying out stream-of-consciousness drawing for the first time and well, most things don't look very impressive the first time you do them.

(If you want to read more about stream-of-cosciousness drawing and my second attempt, go here. It is a post about a booklet I sewed up especially for the drawings and my beginning. I think I want to make a little video of how that booklet turned out. It was pretty cute, and a bit of a surprise.)

Then I had the thought, what about using my old A4 art journal to repurpose? I have been working in a 20cm (8") square journal for the past year, I wouldn't mind bringing an A4 (12"x8") into the mix again.

Art Journal spread in Process

I began to change things up by painting over some of the old pages with the old drawings. Mostly I have kept the drawings, but with paint over and around.

Art Journal pages in progress

Sometimes I pasted down some writing I had cut out of one of my notebooks before I painted. If you want to see more about the process of the spread above it is in my earlier post.

old art journal pages

Here you can see how plain the pages were to start with. No backgrounds, no paint. Just writing and pen drawings with some colour.

Repurposed art journal pages

Here is the spread that I finished. It isn't that it's some amazing art journal spread or anything; I don't really judge my art journal pages anyway. For me it about the experience of seeing how to change it up and what happens. 

Art Journal pages in progress

Here you can get some idea of what it looked like before. It was just writing all around the drawing. Obviously I have already started painting it in the photo.

Here was what I wrote in the journal when I first began in 2011. It was experimental then, and it is experimental now.