Art journaling for beginners: you don't have to be an artist

Words get tired. After enough days of describing the same feeling with the same vocabulary, the writing stops moving anything inside you. This is when most people quit journaling, when really what they needed was a different medium for a while. Art journaling is what you do when the words have nothing left to give you.

What art journaling actually is

It's a journal where the pages contain images, color, texture, collage, scribbles, and sometimes a few words, in any combination. There's no skill requirement and no aesthetic standard. The page is for you. Nobody else needs to understand it.

What separates it from making art is the intention. You're not trying to produce something good. You're trying to externalize a state, and pictures are the route your hand picked for the day.

The lie that you need to be good at art

Most people who avoid art journaling avoid it because they assume their drawings will be bad and that bad drawings mean they shouldn't be drawing. Both halves of that sentence are wrong.

Your drawings will be bad. You're not in art class. Bad drawings carry feeling just as well as good ones, and often better, because they haven't been polished into looking like someone else's. The crooked line, the wrong color, the smudge you didn't mean: these end up holding more of the day than a careful sketch would have.

Tools you already own

• A pencil and any blank notebook.
• Whatever pens are on your desk.
• A pair of scissors and old magazines or junk mail.
• Glue or tape.
• If you want color: any cheap watercolor set, or even highlighters.

The instinct to buy a beautiful art journal and expensive pens is a procrastination tactic. Start with what's on your desk tonight. Upgrade later only if you find yourself doing this regularly.

Five techniques to start

Mood swatches: pick three colors that match how today felt. Fill three rectangles. Label them or don't. You've made a page.

Symbol over word: draw a single object that represents the day. A door, a clock, a bird, a closed fist. Spend ten minutes on it. Don't add words.

Cut-and-paste: tear images from magazines or printed materials that match your mood, without thinking about why. Glue them together. The page will look strange, and that's the point.

Scribble release: fill a page with continuous scribbles while thinking about whatever is pressing on you. Stop when you want to stop. This is closer to physical release than art, and that's fine.

One detail: instead of drawing the whole scene of your day, draw one specific object that was there. The cup. The corner of the desk. The shoe you took off.

Sitting with the ugly page

The first few pages will be ugly. You'll want to tear them out. Don't. The whole point is to write through your taste, not for it. Keep the ugly pages and notice that the world doesn't end. After ten of them, the taste starts to relax, and what comes out is more interesting.

Innera supports drawings, photos, and audio alongside written stories. If you want to keep your art journal in the same place as your written one, you can: take a photo of a page and drop it in, or sketch directly in the app. Either way, what you make stays private.

Try a single ugly page tonight. Three colors, ten minutes. See what happens when you let go of words for one entry.