Maybe you’re already playing around with creative supplies in your planner, making a junk journal, or using pretty pens and stickers in your notebook. Maybe you’re the person who sees someone else’s pages and thinks, “Oh, I’m not creative. I could never do anything like that.” I hear that a lot, especially from folks who aren’t hardcore paper people.
What I want you to understand about creative journaling is that, more than anything, it’s an expression of who you are at this moment.
If you’re a beginner—awesome. Let your pages reflect that. Don’t expect them to be perfect or amazing, or like you’ve been doing this for ten years.
If you’ve been creative for a while, lean into the things that you like doing and the supplies that you love.
If you’re the kind of person who loves to try out new techniques, use your notebook as a place to practice and play.
There are no specific rules for what counts as a page. Whatever makes you feel good is enough.
Creative journaling is a fairly broad creative medium, and it’s a phrase that makes sense for the kind of art that I’m creating. It’s a mixture of scrapbooking, mixed media, journaling, and other forms of creativity. It’s got enough flexibility that you can really do whatever feels like you. You can take 10% from here and 15% from there and just create super simple pages that tell the stories of your everyday life.
Stickers are great, found paper is awesome, art and craft supplies are always fun to use. I can use the stuff I like to tell the stories of my life. I’m not boxing myself into any one genre.
I absolutely still scrapbook (I’m super excited to work on my PL album and December Daily this year). My scrapbooking and my creative journaling have big overlaps, and I think of creative journaling almost as a practice space for my bigger scrapbooks. I get to test out new supplies, techniques I want to work on, and ideas for future pages. It’s also a great place to tell all those stories that aren’t going to get told in my main scrapbooks.
Let me show you a few pages so you can see what I mean.
A few pages from my notebooks
This is a great throwback page. The journaling card bit over on the left was from a Paper/Person Covid kit back during the pandemic. I used it to document still being in quarantine (even though I had no idea we’d still be doing it more than a year later). I picked out a sheet of patterned paper that matched the card and used it to back my pages. I then got some strips of yellow and white journaling card, cut it up and lined them along the right side for my journaling.
There was no need to have a photo since I was talking more broadly about the pandemic in general. There wasn’t like one specific moment to get a snapshot from, so I told the story with what I had on hand.
Ombre tomatoes is one of my favorite pages I’ve ever made. I literally waited a solid week and a half for these tomatoes to ripen so I could get this photo. And I love that I got Jeff in the background of this one. It makes the page feel so much more lived in.
Because the photo tells so much of the story, I felt like I had a little bit more freedom to be artsy on the opposite page. I added in a tiny bit of journaling just to steer the conversation in the right direction. I made the tomato art piece with a wonky circle stamp and a green marker. I kept it simple so that I could really focus in on the tomatoes themselves.
Bravery is another fun page. For this one, I created a background with a black marker and some paint. I used a Brandi Kincaid art print for the words, and then just added a little bit of what I was thinking while I was making this page—a specific scene in Game of Thrones. I think this page does a good job of showing how to take someone else’s words and then use them as a starting point for your own words.
Pictures, words, creative supplies, and bits of life
These are the four kinds of things I use to tell stories in my notebooks. Sometimes I use a few of them together, and sometimes I’m mostly playing around with one. The page doesn’t have to contain all four in order for it to count.
We tell stories in so many different ways. You’ve heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” That’s so true. And you don’t even need to limit yourself to personal photography to tell those words. Stickers are pictures, magazine images are pictures, screenshots are pictures. There are so many ways to bring pictures into your stories aside from using your own printed photos.
The same can be said with journaling. People often think of journaling as personal essay writing. Everything is written in perfect prose. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and everything needs to be full sentences placed together in perfect paragraphs.
And that’s just not the case, especially when it comes to creative journaling. Words do not have to be written as if you’re taking an exam, writing a letter to the editor, or putting together an essay for school. There is so much that counts as journaling—lists, poems, lyrics, phrases.
And the way in which we put those words on the page also matters. The size, the typeface, using caps, eschewing punctuation. It all matters, and there isn’t one way to journal.
When I sit down to make a simple page, I tend to start with creative supplies. I’ll see a sticker or an art print that I’m in the mood to play around with, and I’ll go from there. I also love starting with smaller photos, or “orphaned photos,” which are photos that I printed out to use in a scrapbooking project, but they wound up being extra or leftover, and they no longer have a home. They’re perfect for putting on small pages.
Bits of life can go in there too. A receipt, a piece of packaging, a tag, a note—some type of memorabilia that you want to stick down. You can use the things already sitting around your house.
I can take a photo and then make the rest of the page art journal-y, or I can take a quote from an art print and pair it up with a gel print or some other DIY background. There are no specific supplies that I have to use in order to make the pages count.
This is just a place for you to come and be yourself on the page.
Your turn: Figure out one thing
What I’d like you to do this week is figure out one thing you want to put in your notebook. Whether it’s a picture, some words, a favorite art supply or one you haven’t tried yet, or some type of memorabilia that you want to stick down. Take a look at what you already have. You don’t need to finish a page this week to do this.
One thing I want to keep right now is all the great photos of the baby, and a few little stories of the things that are making us laugh right now. I’m doing my best to not post pictures of her face on social media, so I’ve also been learning how to take photos of her from behind, while still capturing the background or whatever it is she’s doing. It’s been nice to learn how to take a new style of photo.
Maybe you already know what you want to put in your notebook. If you need a little help figuring that out, you can use the Currently List to think about what’s happening in your right-now life. You can start with whichever prompt gives you something to say.
Your story matters. No matter what your life looks like.