A peek into my sketchbook

I always enjoy it when other people share their sketchbooks and art journals, so I thought I'd let you peek into one of mine today! I've had a lot of art journals over the years, and I've shared a few posts about them before. This one was especially popular. But I haven't shared a whole lot from this particular one ... until now. :)

Sometimes art journaling can be overwhelming, because I feel like my entries have to be perfect, or I have to remember to record EVERYTHING, and then my journals start feeling tense. And that's just stupid, because I love the way messy, relaxed journals look, and they're way more fun to make too!

Sometimes I have to literally remind myself to have fun and scribble around in my journals. I have found that it helps if I have a completely separate notebook that is my designated Whatever I Feel Like journal. That's what this one is. It just sort of lays around, and I am allowed to forget about it for a while and pick it up when I feel like it. No pressure. No need to record everything. I have given myself permission to mess around in it. If I make a mistake, I just work with it, or I flip the page and start over but leave the messed up page in place instead of ripping it out (usually). 

But of course, I'm pretty much only sharing the highlights today, obviously. It's my blog, why would I share my ugly art?? ;)

My mind has been wandering a LOT lately. So yesterday I let the words wander with my mind, all over the page, and it reminded me of an ant trail for some reason. And there were also a few ugly blobby scribbles that I didn't like, so I turned them into the ants. :)
(Leaving mistakes in your journals sometimes makes you get more creative, and you end up with an even better result! If I had torn the page out the second I accidentally made those blobs, I wouldn't have thought of this.)

Sometimes I get weird ideas. 

Soooo ... yes, I did stamp the page with chunks of the beets I was eating with supper. Sorry not sorry.

This page has a lot more personal stuff on it, hence the convenient blurring. 

Don't be so snoopy, guys. Gosh. 

;)

These pages are a perfect example of what my brain is like right now. All over the place. Overwhelmed. Exploding. Overhinking. Messy. Questioning.

Two solid pages of this madness, without hardly trying. 

I guess some times in life are just like this - beautiful, in their own way, but a gosh darn convoluted mess at the same time. 

Some doodles from today. 

There's no substitute for a pen and a notebook now and then. It's therapeutic for the frantic brain. Really.

Doesn't it even look more peaceful, after getting that mess out earlier? 

These are a few of my old entries from last year. Sometimes I only write one sentence on a page, and those are actually some of my favorites.
They are so quiet and simple.

This was a poem I wrote using those word poetry magnets that people usually have on their fridges. Except I have them on my closet door. :) This particular poem has actually been on my closet since I painted it with metallic paint back in 2011! Good grief - throwback post, much?
The poem doesn't make any sense, and doesn't "mean" anything, but I liked the way the words sounded together.

Another word poetry thing I came up with. I just liked it. :)

Below is a question I texted one of my friends once, and her reply, typed on my grandma's typewriter.  

My friend just started a blog, btw. You should check it out, because she's lovely. :) 

Oh yeah. And just so you know that I'm not lying about messing up, here is one of my incomplete/messed up pages. It was going to be a scribbly golf cart for a Dear Person letter. But no.
I have multiple pages with indecipherable scribbles like this.

And this is the page I doodled all over to design my cartoon character when drawing my first comic strip. 

See? Not all of my pages are exactly pretty. But I keep them in because 1.) I don't care, this journal is for watever, even - especially - messes, and 2.) messes have a certain charm when you look back on them after enough time has passed.  

Other things I have in this sketchbook include a few successful Dear Person letters, which I can't show here because I'm saving them for a separate post. And in case you were wondering, this is also the sketchbook that I drew these in:

I also pasted in one of the stargazing maps that I had to print out for an astronomy class I took last year. I have a thing for stars and galaxies. <3

See what I mean? :)

Well, there you go. A peek into another one of my art journals. 

Sometimes it's awful fun to splat paint around, be a dork and stamp pages with beets, write easy simple words when you're feeling overwhelmed ... and to just give your brain a chance to breathe and create without any pressure at all. 

Give it a try?