Art Journal Examples

Art Journals Are Messy, and That Is Kind of the Point

I picked up my first journal about six years ago because a friend told me I was overthinking my creativity. She handed me a cheap composition notebook and said just put things in it. No rules. So I did, and I have never gone back to anything that feels more honest. Not because it looks good — most of it does not — but because it forces you to commit instead of hovering on the edge of starting. An art journal is simply a book or notebook where you combine images, text, and mark-making. It is not a sketchbook. It is not a scrapbook. It is not a finished portfolio piece waiting to happen. It is a working document. You can paint over it. You can tear pages. You can glue in trash. The only real requirement is that you show up and put something down. Here is what that actually looks like when you open the book and try to make a page.

Start with a base layer. I usually use watercolor paper sheets, gesso primed, or sometimes just a blank page in a hardbound journal with heavy paper. I grab a brush, mix some acrylic paint — often just a tube of black and a tube of whatever color feels right that day — and I go loose. Big gestures. Cross-hatching. Splatters. Backgrounds that look like nothing yet. This is the part people skip because it feels unproductive. It is the most productive part. You are setting down a foundation that future layers will anchor to. Once that dries, you add collage. This is where art journals diverge from regular drawing. You rip paper. Magazine clippings, old book pages, tissue paper, receipts, whatever you have lying around. I keep a small box labeled "junk" by my desk. The contents shift every few months. You apply the collage with a medium — matte medium works best for most things, though gloss medium gives a different feel. You brush the medium onto the page, lay the paper down, then brush more medium on top to seal it. This prevents the edges from lifting over time. After collage, you draw or paint on top of it. Pencil lines over painted backgrounds. Ink details over collaged textures. Markers for bold shapes. This layering is what creates visual depth. Flat pages feel dead. Layered pages feel lived-in because they are.

Finally, you add writing. A date. A phrase. A list. A question you never answer. I often write with a fine liner or a gel pen directly on top of sealed collage. Some people worry about ink bleeding through unsealed surfaces. If the medium is dry, you are fine. If not, the ink will bead and run, which honestly can look interesting even if it is not what you intended.

Art Journal Examples to Get Started

Example 1: The Abstract Background Page. Start with a sheet of watercolor paper taped to a board. Paint it with diluted acrylics in three colors. Let it dry partially, then spritz it with water and tilt the board so the pigment runs. Add torn book pages. Draw thin ink lines across the top. Write a single word in the corner. This takes about 20 minutes. It does not look like much at first. It looks like more after a week when you add to it. Example 2: The Photo Transfer Page. Print a small image using an inkjet printer onto plain paper. Brush matte medium onto a journal page. Place the printed image face-down onto the medium. Let it dry completely — this means hours, not minutes. Once dry, wet the paper surface and gently rub the fibers away with your finger. The ink remains transferred onto the page. Draw over the result. This technique is finicky. The image often cracks or fades slightly. I have learned to embrace the cracks as texture rather than treating them as failures. Example 3: The Mixed Media Portrait. Sketch a loose face with graphite. Cover half of it with torn tissue paper and seal with medium. Paint the other half in wash colors. Add ink details to both sides. Write lines of text along the edge that seem to float into the portrait. This approach works well when you want something that reads as representational but still feels abstract. The tension between figure and ground is where the page gets interesting.

Example 4: The One-Color Restriction Page. Pick one color. Only that color. Use it in paint, ink, marker, colored pencil, and torn paper. Build contrast through value instead of hue. This constraint sounds limiting but it actually trains your eye to see relationships you normally ignore. I tried this once for an entire month and it changed how I approach color in every other medium, not just journaling. Example 5: The Text-Heavy Journal Page. Start with a column of handwritten text covering most of the page. Paint over sections of it so parts become illegible. Glue small images on top. Draw around the visible text. This is useful when you want the journal to function more like a diary with visual elements rather than a purely visual object. The writing anchors the page emotionally. The marks anchor it visually. There are a few things nobody tells you about art journals that I had to figure out the hard way.

First, the paper weight matters more than you think. A standard notebook at 70 gsm will buckle and tear every time you apply wet media. You need at least 120 gsm, ideally 160 gsm or higher. I switched to a Canson XL Mix Media pad after my first two journals warped into unreadable wavy messes. It costs about the same per sheet and holds up dramatically better. If you buy a pre-bound journal, check the specifications before committing. Many cheap journals list "mixed media friendly" on the cover and then deliver paper that disintegrates under a single wash of watercolor. Second, sealing is not optional if you want longevity. Every collage element, every painted area, every written section should be sealed once the page is complete. I use matte medium thinned slightly with water for a final coat. Without this, humidity and handling will eventually lift edges, darken paper, and make the page unrecognizable within a year or two. This step adds maybe five minutes per page and preserves it for years. Third, and this is the part people resist most — most pages will look bad. Not metaphorically. Actually bad. Ugly. I have pages in my current journal that I will never show anyone and probably never look at again. They exist to teach me something about color combinations I would never try on a "real" page. Or they exist because I was having a bad day and putting paint on paper was the only thing keeping me from doing something worse. The journal is a laboratory. Treat it like one.

I also ran into a specific problem a while back that almost made me quit. I was working on a page where I had layered four or five rounds of collage and paint. On the final round, I added a wash of transparent watercolor over dried acrylic. The water reactivated the acrylic underneath and turned it into a puddle of gray sludge. The entire page became a muddy mess in about ten seconds. I stared at it for a full minute. I considered tearing the page out. Instead, I let it dry completely, then painted over the entire ruined area with opaque white gesso and started fresh on top of that. The underlying texture of the accident showed through faintly and actually improved the final result. Sometimes the workaround is not prevention. Sometimes it is just committing harder to the mistake. If you want a place to download free templates or reference sheets for art journal layouts, there are a number of independent artists who share them online. Search for "free art journal template PDF" and you will find options from sites like Creativebug, the Paper News blog, and various Etsy sellers who offer digital downloads. I tend to sketch my own layouts now because I know my page sizes and spacing preferences, but the free resources are worth looking at when you are stuck on composition. What art journaling is not: it is not a performance. It is not about making something that belongs on Instagram. Some of the best pages I have ever made are the ones I never photographed. The pressure to document everything turns a private practice into a public one, and that shifts your brain into evaluation mode instead of exploration mode. The moment you start judging a page before you finish it, the whole process slows down significantly.

Also worth noting, art journaling has real limits. It does not replace traditional drawing practice if your goal is figure rendering or perspective. It does not replace studio painting if you want to produce work for a gallery showing. It is a separate discipline with its own goals. Mixing them up leads to frustration. If you want to get better at oil painting, paint on canvas. If you want to get better at life drawing, draw from a model. Art journals are for experimentation, emotional processing, and idea generation. They can feed those other practices, but they are not a substitute for them. Another pitfall is collector mentality. I know people who buy expensive journals, fancy pens, and specialty papers and then use none of it for a year. The gear accumulation is a form of procrastination dressed up as preparation. A five-dollar spiral notebook and a Bic pen will get you further than a $40 Moleskine and a set of Tombow markers sitting untouched on a shelf. Start with what you have. Buy better supplies only after you have exhausted the current ones. The simplest path forward is also the most effective. Buy a journal with decent paper. Fill it. Make bad pages. Seal the good ones. Repeat. That is it. There is no deeper secret hidden in the third chapter of any book about it. The examples above are just variations on the same core loop: apply base, add texture, layer details, seal, repeat.

One practical habit I picked up late and wish I had started earlier: date every page. Not just the first page of a session, but every single page. I used to think this was unnecessary bureaucracy. Then I tried to flip back through old journals to find a specific color combination I liked six months ago and spent forty-five minutes searching through hundreds of undated pages. Dating takes three seconds and saves hours later. If you open a blank page right now and put one mark down, you have already done more than most people who claim they want to be creative. The rest is just showing up consistently and accepting that half the pages will disappoint you. That is not a bug. That is the system working as intended.