DCWV Little Art Book

When I first found out about Project Life I was so excited because I thought it seemed easier and the people I saw doing it were using it in a much more artistic and creative manner. I saw it as a potential way for me to combine scrapbooking AND art journaling. Breaking up the pages into smaller bite size pieces seemed so much more approachable and less daunting than full 12×12 pages, or even smaller pages… Woah, while typing that I just had a flashback to this “scrapbook” from 2005 (below). It wasn’t project life, but just a small scrapbook that I thought would be smaller and also easier in the same way that Project Life seemed.

I searched Flickr but apparently I never shared any pages from it. It was really meant as a personal book, so there aren’t many pages that I felt comfortable sharing, but above is the first page of the book. At the time, my mom and sister were really into going to these scrapbooking and stamping classes, but it still seemed so planned out and lacked the freedom of expression I was looking for. Around 2002 or 2003 I bought this mini album (pages 7×7″) with the intention of combining scrapbooking and Art and then didn’t actually do anything in it for a few years. I love that it has those strips of woven paper in the background. That is something that found it’s way into a lot of my artwork during college. Always green woven magazine. Fast forward past this, and even past my attempts at Project Life.

I found this super mini DCWV Insta scrapbook I bought at JoAnn Fabrics (Ooooh, looks like they are super reduced and I might pick up more filler pages for only$1.50!) The album caught my eye because it was next to the Fuji Instax Mini cameras. I have a Fuji Instax Wide and have been wanting to buy an album to hold my pictures for that. The pages were not really suited for the wide pictures, but I did notice that some pages would hold 2×2 pictures which I thought might be perfect for printed out instagrams. And then of course there is always this desire to combine scrapbooking and art.

But instead of scrapbooking/art journaling, I ended up taking this book in the direction of Art and design alone. I obviously have the a thing for little Artist’s books. After I made that tiny Matchbook piece for the Strike Away Show I was really wanting to work more in a super tiny format. So booom! This album was perfect. I just cut up a bunch of watercolor pages into 2x2s, as well as some 4×4 pages, and started having fun. If you were interested in doing something like this, you could use Project Life or any PL styled scrapbooking pages.

I mostly stuck with watercolors, but some pages have gel pens (white and gold) as well as colored pencil and regular graphite pencils. (side note, I’ve been becoming more and more obsessed with the quality of pencil line work, and have been using it more and more in my art and design lately)

If you follow me, or the Little Art Book, on instagram you’ve probably seen these pages (and seen these pages again). I tried to make sure there was something in each picture for size comparison since the book is so small.

As usual, when I first started this project I was just having fun and had no expectations. Now that I’ve shared some of these pages and it’s time to make some more, I’ve got this self imposed “This better be good” feeling, immediately followed by the “I’m afraid I’ve lost my mojo” feeling. Tale as old as time.

One last side note: these pieces were all made, not in my designated art studio room, but spread out, and lying on the living room floor while listening to music or watching netflix.