Red Leather Art Journal Flip Through

A video flip through and some notes on how I made and used an art journal that I worked in for about a year.

I haven’t posted a flip through in a while so I thought I’d take today to show off a journal that has been around four years in the making. Sometimes I don’t know I’m finished with a book until some time has past. That’s certainly true for this book because I was working on pages and adding them in. Usually when you run out of pages, you’re done! It’s magic like that! But this book worked differently because I kept adding pages. And could keep adding pages as long as I liked.

Debbie mailed me this red leather in 2020. Pandemic fun mail was a real thing with my crew that year. I liked the irregularity of the leather and thought it would make a cool ring journal. So I built it out with quite a few pages but I didn’t start working in it until September 2023.

New approach

My approach to this journal was different that usual because I decided to add pages in where I felt they fit instead of putting them in chronologically. At first, I just worked on one side of the pages. Which left blanks at the top. After I worked in it for a while I started going back and adding to the backs of pages. As I worked, I realized that I wanted this book to be about texture and about color flow.

I had a lot of really good exploration and experimentation in this book. It was more deliberate than some books I’ve made. I think that’s because I chose not to work through it chronologically. Without the rigidity of a prebound structure, I was able to concentrate on layers in a whole new way. I might have eventually gotten there in a prebound book but this was a really forgiving way to explore it.

Resources

I talk several times in the video about a recipe for making pages. My friend Tanyalee Kahler birthed the idea of a short list of instructions where you can make pages using supplies on hand. We did a few last year in the United Artists Collective. So you’ll hear me talk about those in the video. The Van Gogh inspired page above was made with one of her recipes.

Video flip through

What have you finished recently? I’d love to hear about it! Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.