This December I’m working on a new project: creating a daily digital art journal page!
Art journals are a great way to incorporate collage and text; they’re fun to make and look back through once they’re done. The process of making art and writing a diary entry can be very similar– but since you’re constrained to just one or two pages, you need to be succinct with your art AND your words. I’m not in the habit of making art journals (though I have a regular ol’ text journal that I love), so it’s going to be a very interesting project for me this month.
I’m planning on sharing my entries here, with notes on how I developed the page. And then I’ll share that page with you, so you can make your own art journal page if you want! 
Today’s entry was a little easy because I already had the background from from last week’s creating spree. All I had left to do was pick a focus image. The one I chose is an illustrated child found on Pixabay, because she went well with the color scheme I had going on– green, blue, and white. I tweaked her colors slightly using one of Canva’s filters and shoved her in the corner so I’d have a space for my journal entry.
This was super simple: I just added a rectangle as the “entry block,” and picked a corresponding color using Canva’s color picker. There’s a thingy that analyzes the colors in the image elements on your piece of art, so it’s SUPER easy to pick colors that go together. For instance, the green of the text box is also present in the background image. Easy-peasy matching.
Once I had the focus image and the text box ready, I had to write the journal entry, which ended up being a) my shock of how it’s already DECEMBER and b) things I want to do this month. I prefer the look of the handwritten font (Amsterdam Three, which I got through CreativeMarket as a freebie a while back) with all the other image elements, though it DOES make the entry a little more difficult to read. But for now I’d prefer that things look good together, so slightly unreadable font it is.
Finally, I added in my flourishes. This took the most time, honestly, because I wanted to make sure that everything worked together and that no single image element was just floating around in space. It was a lot of moving around of image elements and flowers, and trying to make sure it looked good. Luckily I stumbled across the illustrated flowers in Canva’s free images, and they entirely made the piece. I made sure to overlap them slightly with the text box and the focus image illustration to help anchor them to the background…and that was it! Done!
Not too bad for my first digital art journal page ever. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the month! I’m planning on posting my art journal entries each week, so check back soon for the next few pages.
If you’d like to download this page for yourself:
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