Lined Notebook as Art Journal | new project

[iHanna]

All you can do is arrange things that are already here. Everything’s already here anyway. The idea that creativity means making something out of nothing, that’s nonsense, of course.

– Wim T. Schippers

I have started a new project where I am re-purposing my mom’s mother’s old address book. I picked it up when she died, because I am a paper hoarder after all. It has just been laying around here, most of the pages are half empty except for a few ladies marked “pen pal”, which I find very sweet.

This address book has a red alphabet index, which could be used in some way I’m sure, but for now I am ignoring it and just working on one page at a time in this notebook. I am filling the ordinary, lined pages with colorful collage, using what I have at hand. I am letting myself play with my favorite colors, yellow, pink, red and orange. I am looking for my most colorful paper scraps for this project, and trying to use them without fear of them “running out”.


I am having so much fun with it.

The address notebook, before.

Here’s the first page of the book, where I left some of my grandmother’s handwriting at the top, then added some of my own about where I got this notebook from and what it was used as before I decided to dedicate it to a collage art journal.

I did not give myself any specific rules to follow in this art journal, although unintentional rules always come along anyway. Or maybe they’re design principles of sort, ideas on what material and colors you want to work with right now, if any. I am working with mostly magazine scraps in this art journal, because I was longing to make a collage when I got started.

On my second spread I used a chunk of text from a garden magazine that kind of set the theme for the book in a way:

Second spread of collage in lined notebook re-purposed as Art Journal.

Translated it’s something like “Here comes a portrait of a colorful and easy-grown beauty. In yellow, pink, orange and red that will cheer up any _ place.” The kitten image, if you can spot it, is a taped flap that reveals other scrap bits beneath it. “Snart tillbaka” means “Back soon”, which I hope I will be.

If the cover had been plain black I would have made a collage patchwork on top of it, but it’s been covered in contact paper (plastic sticker paper) that I thought was quite sweet, so all I did was “sticker bomb” the front of it, to make it more me.

Re-purposing Mormor’s address notebook and making it into an art journal. I’ve also decorated the cover with stickers.

I can not recall having an art journal this size before, or if I’ve ever filled a lined notebook in this way other than when making “glue books” (which is the same thing but totally different). I am looking forward to filling up all these pages, and seeing how chunky she gets.



Sign up for the Studio iHanna Newsletter here



Books on art, crafts & creativity



Read about this lill’ workshop here



The post is written by Hanna Andersson and Lined Notebook as Art Journal | new project first appeared on iHannas Blog.