get messy: season of words week one

It’s Get Messy Thursday! This is the day of the week where all the Get Messians share bits of their journals from the current season. These are just the pages that I’ve done so far in my Season of Words art journal. Most of the spreads were inspired by the journaling and art prompts from this week.

I will say that journaling in this altered book is difficult. The pages of the book that I’m using don’t hold up the media I like to use very well, even if I gesso them before hand. The paper just can’t take the gesso either! If I were to do this over, I already know that I’ll probably gut the entire book of its pages and sew in my own inserts of better quality paper, like thick cardstock, graph paper and watercolor paper. Paper that I know will take any sort of odd medium I enjoy using well. I love the look of using the old book pages, but they just don’t hold up very well. When prepping my book, I glued three or four of the pages together, so they’re thick, but something about adding wet mediums to it makes the paper just die on me. Good thing that they don’t fall out of the spine binding, that’s not the problem. They just sag almost, worst that regular notebook paper does. I don’t know, this is just one of the pet peeves I’ve already noticed has begun to happen as I journal in this book.

It’s a great learning experience though. My pretty book may not come out how I had hope in the end, but I do know what I should do differently if I were to alter another book in the future. I’m already thinking of getting another book and trying this again sometime next year, maybe for a different season. But in the meantime, hopefully I can fill the pages of this book without it completely falling apart on me. Though, now that I think of it, it could also be that the weather has been very rainy and humid, so the moisture in the air added to the wet mediums don’t allow the pages to dry very well. Either way, I have a love/hate relationship with my book at the present time. Hopefully the more I work in it, the more I can salvage and make it into something I love and am proud of.

Anyway, enjoy the pages I did this week so far!