Sometimes I want to sit down with my supplies and see what happens. Pull out some colors I love, try something with a stencil or a stamp, and spend a little time making something in my notebook. I don’t always have a particular story in mind when I start.
I look at creative journaling in small notebooks as a place to practice and play. I’m learning skills, building a creative habit, and having fun. That makes it SO much easier to use those skills when I do want to tell a big story on a scrapbook page. And along the way, I’ve made little pages that tell stories about who I am, what I like, and what’s interesting to me at this moment in time.
Today I want to share one of those pages with you. I made the background with a gel plate, some numeral masks, and a few colors of paint. Afterward, I picked out some words from Brandi Kincaid’s Extravagant Hope monthly mailer that fit how I was feeling that day.
One of the things I really love about this page is the colors. I have a few bottles of paint in my desk drawer that I absolutely love, and I’m a big sucker for warm colors—oranges, pinks, yellows, reds. I love seeing them all together. With gel printing, you can layer colors on top of each other, and depending on the translucency or opacity of the paint, you’ll get entirely new shades.
I also love taking something familiar, like these numbers, and using it to create shapes in a background. The numeral masks cover parts of the gel plate so different colors of paint can come through as you build the layers. You can recognize bits of the numbers in the finished print, and I love seeing how they look together.
Here’s a sped-up look at how the page came together.
So one of the big things about this one is that most of the time spent on this page was making the background. Playing with the colors, arranging the masks, building the layers, drying the layers, and getting that painted paper into my notebook. Choosing and adding the words was a much smaller part of the process.
And the most important thing is that’s how I wanted to spend my creative time that day. I wanted to play with paint and make a background I loved looking at. Having a collection of words to easily flip through afterward gave me a way to add something meaningful when I was ready.
Gel printing is also a really fun way to embrace imperfection. It’s definitely a skill you can get better at with practice, but putting paint on a gel plate with different stencils, masks, and layers is never going to produce the exact same print twice. There’s always something you don’t quite know until you pull the paper off the plate.
When I’m making gel prints for my smaller notebooks, I usually keep them fairly simple. Depending on the technique, you need layers to dry in between, so building up more than a couple can take a while. There’s no specific point where I always know I’m done. With the layered gel printing process, the first layer on the plate becomes the top layer of the print, so I don’t really know how everything will look together until I pull it.
I know a lot of us deal with perfectionism creeping into our scrapbooking, memory-keeping, and creative journals. It can make us resist things like gel printing or stamping because we can’t completely control the result. But practicing with that unpredictability can help us get more comfortable making things.
For me, it’s easier to work through perfectionism with a process that’s always going to have some surprises. I can try something, see what happens, and learn from it. My little notebook gives me a place to keep doing that.
And the page is already saying something about me. These are colors I love. These are shapes I wanted to play with. This is how I chose to spend a little bit of my day. You don’t have to specifically use words to tell a story.
When I did want words for this page, I flipped through my collection and found something that fit.
Last week, we talked about the different ways words can work in our journals, including using words someone else has already written. I keep a small collection for exactly that purpose. Usually it lives in a little box I can flip through on my desk; these days, it’s in the little pink binder I showed you a few weeks ago.
I save things mostly because they resonate with me. A phrase, a title, a paragraph of prose or poetry. I’m constantly saving little bits of words that mean something to me, even when I have no idea what I might use them for.
I try to keep that collection manageable, because having too much to choose from slows down my decision-making. I used to keep lots of books and magazines around, but I found I rarely used them in my small notebooks. And while I still like pulling them out for larger collage projects; for everyday pages, I like having a smaller selection I can easily flip through.
When I’m choosing words, I’m generally looking for one of two things:
Something that works well with the page visually, or
Something that speaks to how I’m feeling. Joyful, brave, excited, confused, sad—whatever’s going on that day.
A lot of my words come from Brandi Kincaid. She’s especially good at putting words to things we might be thinking but rarely say out loud. She talks about hope and joy and seeing little bits of goodness in the world, even when it feels like a total pile of suck.
The words I chose for this page were about remembering the goodness around you while the hard stuff is still happening. That sentiment fit how I felt when I made the page, and it’s something I love having in my notebook to come back to. It still feels useful today.
If you want to start your own little collection, grab a small box or envelope and pull a few things that mean something to you. You might already have a postcard you love, a sticker with great words, or a phrase on a sheet of scrapbook supplies. You can also write something down in a journal where you keep bits of found words. Brandi’s emails and shop are wonderful places to look, too.
And the next time you sit down with your notebook, give yourself some time to play with a part of making that you enjoy. Make a background with paint, stamps, stickers, or scraps of paper. See where it goes. You can choose some words afterward if you want them.
We’ll be playing with this together at our paid-subscriber small-page make-along on Saturday, November 7, at 3 p.m. ET. Our theme is Using Other People’s Words in Your Pages. Bring some words you’d like to play with and whatever supplies you feel like using. I’ll send the Zoom link and a few printables later this week and another email invitation that day.
I’m looking forward to making some pages together again!