#1. There are NO rules.
HA! That’s why I love art journaling so much! Seriously. There are no rules. You do whatever you want, however you want. You honor yourself, your artistic style, your thoughts, your feelings, your inner child, your wise self. You can be playful, you can be serious, you can dump whatever you feel on the page. You can share it with the world, you can hide it under your mattress and show no one. You are the boss.
A journal can be created out of just about anything. My shelf above shows some hand made journals, some spiral bound store bought journals, come composition notebooks, a smashbook, a fabric journal, an altered book… These are the ones I reach for most often.
The cool thing about art journaling, besides having no rules, is that there is no real definition either. It involves art. And a substrate – a journal. What you do with it is up to you. I am personally a little scattered in my journaling. I love so many different “styles” of AJing. One of my favorite things to do with a regular book is found poetry. It’s great when you don’t feel like using your own words and it’s always a surprise what your brain comes up with.
Another one of my favorite things to do is use song lyrics. Sometimes just a phrase or a word says all I need to say at the moment. This was done in a handmade art journal in a lettering class I took from Joanne Sharpe at CREATE Chicago last year.
“Ultraviolet” lyrics by Stiff Dylans
Very rarely do I sit and write out long paragraphs of touchy-feely stuff. I admire people who can do that, who have the ability to get it all out. I’m just not one of them. The only time I did a lot of writing was when I went through cancer treatment. Sometimes my pages were simple. The only “art” involved was painting around the squirrels and rabbits. Some days that’s all I could manage.
Sometimes I just wrote and wrote and got it all out. I’m not going to show you those pages. But I will show you this one. It’s a funny story and makes me smile when I think about it. Let’s see how stalker-ish you are and if you can read my words, hehe.
I am a stalker of other people’s art journals. When I see pages of art journals in magazines, I try to read what they wrote. I have a LOT of books on art journaling. This is only half of them. These are the “how to” books and inspirational books.
I want to know… what is your style of art journaling? Do you pour your heart out and hide your journal under the mattress? Are you a one word wonder? Full color person, doodler, painter? Or all of the above, like me?
I am giving away this book by Quinn McDonald, called Raw Art Journaling. It’s one of my favorites, probably why I ended up with two 
It goes over a lot of great basics and includes some great exercises for starting. Leave me a comment answering the question above and I’ll randomly pick a winner for the book. Let’s see… I’ll give you the weekend and I’ll pick a winner Sunday night.
Start thinking about your style… interesting, huh?