Art Journaling Prompts: Habits

New to art journaling? Curious about this fun papercraft? Then join me for a series on Art Journaling Prompts, where I share a few of my art journaling ideas and tricks.

This week I’m sharing art journaling pages I did for a class on Art Journaling with Gelatos. Let’s take a look!

Art Journaling: Writing. Or, What if I don’t want to write in my art journal?

Let’s talk about the journaling part of art journaling. Lots of people ask, “Can I still art journal if I don’t like to write?” The answer is of course you can. You can write as much or as little as you like—some of my pages have a lot of writing and some have just a few words. You can have absolutely no words at all on a page, if you prefer to express yourself with color and images instead. Since I’m a Word Person, I always include writing on my pages—but sometimes I keep the amount of text pretty light.

For this art journaling page, I borrowed a popular journaling approach from scrapbooking: Using numbers to journal. You can list items as bullet points, as I did here, which makes it an easy way to incorporate your thoughts without adding a lot of text. And if you want to add more writing, that’s easy too…just make each habit a paragraph. (Or more!)

When I don’t have a lot of writing, I like to make my page title larger and more dramatic. Here, I cut out the headline letters from white cardstock, then glued them onto a simply colored background and wrote directly onto the page.

Art Journaling Prompt: Habits

So here’s the art journaling prompt for today: Habits.

Ah, habits! We tend to think of them as intrinsically bad, for some reason, or something that needs to be changed or dropped or otherwise eliminated. So this week, let’s explore them in a different light. Grab a pen and a scrap piece of paper and jot down 3-5 habits you’re proud of. These could include things that have to do with health or daily routines; they could be silly or funny or superstitious or serious or all of these things.

Tip: I like to do my writing on scrap paper before I add it into my art journal. This is a personal preference but I find it helps me feel more relaxed about fitting everything onto my page, and making sure I don’t forget anything! Then I can create my background according to my journaling.

Art Journaling: The Background.

I like to keep my backgrounds fairly simple when it comes to color and dimension—mostly because I don’t like to wait for things to dry! That’s one reason I like using Faber-Castell Gelatos on my art journaling pages. Then can be applied right onto the background, wet or dry; even if you mix them with water, gesso, gel medium or each other, they don’t take long to dry.

I mixed Tangerine Gelato pigment stick with a little gesso, then used a kitchen sponge to apply the color through a Quatrefoil stencil from The Crafter’s Workshop.

I mixed more gesso Gelato on my craft sheet, then used an empty tape roll as a stamp to create circled on the paper. Finally, I mixed watery Tangerine Gelato and spattered it onto the background with a paintbrush.

The result is a little color, a little texture and a little journaling—in the end, it looked quite minimalist to me, which was actually just what I wanted to achieve here. The pages themselves are 8″x8″ acrylic paint paper, so the clean and simple approach was also perfect for the page size.

Hope you enjoyed today’s Art Journaling Prompt!

Intrigued by art journaling? You might check out my Art Journaling with Gelatos online workshop, available at Creative Workshops. It’s over 3 hours of video demonstration, featuring 15 art journaling prompts and techniques with Faber-Castell Gelatos, plus design tips and writing tricks. Hope to see you there!