Get Your Creative Year Started with Art Journal January!
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- December 5, 2017
- Brett Kelley
Get Your Creative Year Started with Art Journal January!
The potential of a New Year can reinvigorate an artist! Being able to shake off a year’s accumulation of stress and enter a phase of productive renewal can be therapeutic. It's a great time for an artist to begin a new project, collect or formulate ideas and work towards bringing them to life in 2018.
Imagining what to work on for the next twelve months (or longer) can seem daunting, but there is nothing that says the process has to be a grueling one! Consider this an open invitation to participate in a new thalo original inspiration project, Art Journal January!
Show off your art journal by tagging #artjournaljanuary
The Challenge:
For the month of January, create your very own Art Journal! You can fill out a page a day, or week-by-week creating a map for your upcoming creative year! Set and reach goals for what you want your journal to be. You can share your progress online using social media (facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc.). At the end of the challenge, you should have a rich and unique series of ideas and concepts to fuel your ambition throughout the year!
What is an “Art Journal”?
For the purpose of this exercise, an Art Journal is a book containing sketches, ideas and/or studies that can direct or inspire an artist’s work. Leonardo Da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Julie Bell, Guillermo Del Torro, Tim Burton, Rebecca Guay; All these creatives among many more have used journals to record their ideas and used them to help temper their bodies of work. Many of these journals are veritable works of art in their own right, providing the building blocks to grander visions!
An Art Journal can help productively map out your year, explore ideas you have in your head for the month of January, or simply serve as the primary collection of your creative concepts . Or, you can record your life as creatively as you would like!
Pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's Notes
The Benefits:
Creatively, Art Journals help focus and record ideas for bodies of work. They also serve in exploring new avenues and styles of art conceptually. The act of planning and setting goals can be greatly satisfying; especially when those ideas are cultivated over time.
A benefit of posting your progress online is the opportunity to invite people to see your process and get to know you as a creative. The more people that see (and share) your development can get to know your work more personally, which can create a stronger interest in the finished product. This process can also create a larger fan base and hopefully higher sales of completed art!
Creating a journal is all about recording ideas!
How do you Participate?
Participation in Art Journal January is entirely up to you! Whether it is simply jotting notes down into a three-ring binder or curating pages of possible paintings in a customized notebook, anything goes! You can record your process of writing, photography, painting, drawing; anything that captures your creative process.
To show how you are progressing, you can upload your sketches and works in progress on social media with the hashtag #artjournaljanuary!
(Other acceptable tags: #ArtJournalJanuary, #ArtJournalJanuary2018, #AJJ2018, or #thaloartjournaljanuary) and be sure to tag us on Instragram @thaloart as well!
You are free to share as much or as little of your work/ideas that you are comfortable with, it all lies on your decisions and exploration.
The beauty of art journaling is that you make it your own, using what inspires and motivates you and sharing it with other people. If our staff see any great examples, they may share and showcase that work and artist!
If you are still looking for inspiration, be sure to check back here for another thalo original article on “Art Journaling 101” to give you some ideas on how to start before the New Year begins!
UPDATE: Be sure to check out our "Art Journaling 101" Article for ideas on how to prepare!
Chartpak Inc. is affiliated with Thalo, LLC
