Hello!  I’m AJ and this blog is about my adventure into art journaling.  I’ve always loved looking at ways of being creative and discovering art journaling earlier this year has been a wonderful and inspiring experience for me.

I was first inspired to start art journaling when I watched the YouTube videos of Teesha Moore earlier this year. 

A few years ago I attended a Lomographic Society World Congress in London, I was on my own and a little nervous but on the first day I was fortunate to meet up with Teesha’s husband, Tracy, and their daughter Trista.  Tracy and Trista looked after me and we became friends. As well as lots of cameras Tracy carried about with him a beautiful hand made journal which he encouraged everyone he met to draw or write in. I knew that Tracy and his family were all very creative and artistic people but I didn’t understand about art journaling until I discovered Teesha’s video turorials about art journaling. I was blown away by her work and inspired to have a go myself.   Teesha creates wonderful, vibrant and fantastical journal pages as you will see if your visit her website. 

Since then as well as experimenting and trying to find my own style for art journaling I have searched the internet for inspiration, ideas and more tutorials.

Paula Phillips aka Journal Artista has been hugely inspirational.  Paula is so generous with her time, sharing her ideas and encouraging newbies like me. She has a Ustream channel and records programmes every week about her art and creativity. She is an absolute treasure so please check her out. Right now Paula has a little competition going on on her blog, you are supposed to use a stencil to enter, but I haven’t got any, in the image on my header I did use a masking tecnnique with Post-it notes that Paula demonstrated, I wonder if that counts?

The image above is the first page of one of my first journals and is called appropriately It’s A New Beginning. It was a start and I’m hoping that things will improve as time goes on. 🙂