A very simple art journal page for beginners

Starting an art journal can be considered as complicated if you just watch others' already made pages and trying to figure out how they do it to look so great.

There are all sort of tutorials on youtube and on blogs like mine, but I would recommend you to start as simple as it can be. That way you'll get best results at the beginning and it will make you feel more confident to continue and develop your own technique.

I made a page to show you what I mean. A good example for keeping it simple is this one I call The Moon, because I used a greeting card with Alphonse Mucha's art by that name.

As you can see I really didn't put much work into it but the background of the page is ready to be used for written diary or a quote.

So, how did I do it step by step... I used notebook, any will do as long it has a little better quality paper. Watercolors obviously, nothing special with the background pattern, just in colors that match my greeting card, some horizontal and vertical lines with a brush and leave it to dry. Four large circle cuts from an old magazine and glued to the page. Lace pattern at the edge is washi tape, swirl pattern in the middle is drawn by hand (obviously) with black marker and it's ok to be a little crooked, you are not a robot to make every spiral identical and prefect. The final touch is black doodle lines around the circles and some smaller circles.

It's ok to put other artists work in your art journal as long as you don't sell it and if you use it for practice. It's not violating any copyrights and in the beginning it helps you that your pages look lovely without much effort. Eventually you will become more confident and you won't need that "help" anymore.