Art Journalling and Zentangling

I began art journalling in 2014 because I wanted to start bringing a little artwork back into my life. I enjoyed the first year of challenges offered by the Facebook group ‘A Documented Life.’ I greatly valued the range of artistic ideas the challenges provided, and enjoyed many of the prompts.

2014 Art Journal week 23 - things to be grateful for

I enjoyed the project even more in 2015, with each week offering a prompt for a particular artistic technique and medium. I was starting to find it difficult trying to keep up with producing a weekly piece though, and by the end of the year I was  not so sure about continuing.

2015 Art Journal: a featured motif + watercolour crayons

After musing about whether to continue with A Documented Life in 2016, they announced that they were introducing a fee for people to be a member and access the challenges and prompts, and so  I decided not to continue with them. I was not particularly interested in furthering my involvement with techniques like collage, stamping, colour exercises, printing, using back paper, and so on, but it had been a delight to have these re-introduced me to. I also wanted to explore zentangling. I decided to created a piece of artwork a month in the form of a concertina-shaped book. Nearly all of that year’s images were based on photographs I had taken that month, and many of them used zentangling. The ‘journal’ aspect of the work became increasingly tenuous however, and was sometimes tagged on almost as an afterthought. I fully recognised that it was creating pieces of art that was the interest, not the journalling.

I started again in 2017 and produced January to March, but realised that my heart was no longer in it. I did not feel the need to journal my life. There did not seem to be more that I wanted to explore in terms of working from photographs to artwork. I gave myself permission to stop. I will always be grateful to the five artists of the Documented Life Project for getting me back into creating on paper. I was fully back into creating regular artwork, but zentangling had become my passion.

One of my earliest zentangles