Lately, finding the time, or inspiration, to jump back into art journaling was waning fast. The hustle-bustle of gearing up, then winding down, from the Holidays left me with only enough energy to get back to organizing, planning, and cleaning.

But, because there were still quite a few memories that didn’t make into my  “Holiday Journal”, I started a new one. It’s going to be kind of a “Gratitude” journal. I did one of these few years back, but that one was a daily gratitude journal, and it became too daunting, so I’m going to try a new approach this time and hopefully this one will be easier to keep up with.

Today, I thought I would share a few elements that I used to get this art journal organized.

First, I went through my photos and grabbed some memories. My family was spread all over the place this year and we didn’t have time to take a lot of photos, so grabbed what I could. I made sure to attach the dates on the back to keep them in order.

In my travels over the last month or so I grabbed paper ephemera whenever I thought of it. I’m super glad I did because these bits will be perfect for this project!

Next, I prepped my pages. Here, I prepped one side to show the difference, it shows up much better on the text and scrapbook paper pages, but there you go.

First I scrape some gesso, then a layer of tinted matte medium, then a bubble wrap stamp with more gesso. Most of it gets covered with collage, but small bits poke out enough for interest.

This is a page of my grandson wearing his camouflage antlers while brushing his teeth. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on the blinking lights before taking this photo 😦

I’m still attempting to use up as much random ephemera as I can, and I have to say I’m making quite a dent in it. I actually had to open up another “box of random” to fill my art journaling containers! Speaking of which, in my next blog post I hope to share some of my organizing techniques for art journaling, I almost have it down to a science.

That’s it for now, I’m supposed to be driving over the pass right now, but one of my goals this year is to write one blog post a week, and I didn’t want to put it off longer than I should.

So, until next week (I hope),

Thank you for the visit,

~Patty