A to Z Blogging Challenge Theme Reveal: An Art Journal Page a Day

Hello, Everyone! Today I'm revealing my A to Z theme: An Art Journal Page a Day. For anyone unfamiliar with the challenge, the idea is to blog every day during the month of April except for Sundays, and to base each post on a letter of the alphabet. 

This year I'll be creating a small art journal for the month along with tips so you can try something similar yourself. I can't promise it will be a fantastically beautiful journal (see Help, I Hate My Art Journal!), but it will be fun, and it will be a good discipline to collage and journal on a near-daily basis.

To get us all in the art journaling mood, I thought I'd share some pages from past journals. 

I used an actual piece of papyrus on this page. I'm not sure why I associated
Paris with Egypt, but it might have had something to do with the Louvre.
Whatever, to me art journaling is about emotion, not precision.

I found these Betsy McCall paper dolls on line.  I loved
Betsy as a child, but she was a difficult role model
to live up to. My mother had an even more difficult time
trying to understand why I couldn't be as band-box perfect
as dear Betsy, even when I explained to her Betsy was a doll, while I 
was a real little girl. The story of our entire relationship.

This particular collage was in memory of my grandmother. The
picture of the little girl isn't of  her, but reminds me of her all the same.

I put these maps together for a short story I was writing at the time.
My favorite technique was coloring in the black-and-white photocopy of rocks
and sea with colored pencil.

I created this spread after reading a novel set in Africa.

I made this page after I finished writing my novel, Overtaken. 
The bracelet had been one of my  initial writing prompts 
that fueled much of the story.

After Overtaken was published, I wanted to do something with the
old manuscript pages. So I did this.

Using old, failed, watercolors in a new way.

These two pages were created months apart. I was first intrigued enough by
"The Lady in White" to consider using her as the model for a
possible novel set in Egypt. Then when I came across her again in an orange
sweater, I knew there really was a story to write. Currently it's still very much
a WIP, but I'd like to return to it one day. These pages
are a good inspiration and starting point.

So start collecting your junk mail, magazines, ribbons and bows and get ready to journal. See you on April 1, and don't forget your glue sticks!