Visual Journals, A Safe Place to Take Risks
The visual journal is a reflective altered-book or sketchbook that students use to document and express their lived experiences. Within these pages the student should not only make critical and aesthetic judgments about the world, but also to focus on the process of artmaking rather than just the final product.
Visual journals give freedom to explore ideas, experiment with materials, and discover technique. They also allow multiple opportunities for fresh starts.
This is a place to “embrace your vulnerability” and take risks and embrace failures as learning opportunities. Your visual journal will become the place where your life meets your art. It should be a safe space for you to engage in creative acts by modeling your own process of noticing details, viewing relationships, and articulating the connections between viewing art and making art.
Consider this statement from Michael Bell…
VISUAL JOURNALING
"Visual journaling is a creative way to express and record life's experiences, feelings, emotional reactions, or our inner world - visually and verbally. Essentially, visual journaling can become a potential key to the artmaking process.
Exploring our own thought process through visual journaling is essential in a world that is in a state of continuous change. Just as there are many ways to express oneself artistically, there are many ways to create visual journals. By committing to the visual journaling process, one can learn how to access his/her inner language of imagery and express it both visually and verbally, while exploring the connection between image and word. Through visual journaling one can also become capable of articulating connections between their own personal art-making experiences and the works of master and contemporary artists."
- Michael Bell
Celebrity Artist
www.mbellart.com
Some examples of Michael Bell’s student’s sketchbooks are at this link
http://www.visualjournaling.com/sketchbooks.html
The visual journal is a reflective altered-book or sketchbook that students use to document and express their lived experiences. Within these pages the student should not only make critical and aesthetic judgments about the world, but also to focus on the process of artmaking rather than just the final product.
Visual journals give freedom to explore ideas, experiment with materials, and discover technique. They also allow multiple opportunities for fresh starts.
This is a place to “embrace your vulnerability” and take risks and embrace failures as learning opportunities. Your visual journal will become the place where your life meets your art. It should be a safe space for you to engage in creative acts by modeling your own process of noticing details, viewing relationships, and articulating the connections between viewing art and making art.
Consider this statement from Michael Bell…
VISUAL JOURNALING
"Visual journaling is a creative way to express and record life's experiences, feelings, emotional reactions, or our inner world - visually and verbally. Essentially, visual journaling can become a potential key to the artmaking process.
Exploring our own thought process through visual journaling is essential in a world that is in a state of continuous change. Just as there are many ways to express oneself artistically, there are many ways to create visual journals. By committing to the visual journaling process, one can learn how to access his/her inner language of imagery and express it both visually and verbally, while exploring the connection between image and word. Through visual journaling one can also become capable of articulating connections between their own personal art-making experiences and the works of master and contemporary artists."
- Michael Bell
Celebrity Artist
www.mbellart.com
Some examples of Michael Bell’s student’s sketchbooks are at this link
http://www.visualjournaling.com/sketchbooks.html
Where to start. Words and pictures and words and pictures and words and....
A blank page can be very intimidating. Here are some suggestions for de-whitening your sketchbook page...
A blank page can be very intimidating. Here are some suggestions for de-whitening your sketchbook page...
- tear a page out of an old book and underline words that catch your eye. paint out all the other words. add drawings and images in the painted areas.
- paint two open pages with a color that reflects your mood at the moment. Find a quote from something you are reading and start there.
- Celebrate your vulnerability! cut up some of your old artwork and glue it into your sketchbook. Cut out the areas you don't like and create a guilded frame for them.
- Find examples of other artist work and glue them into your sketchbook. expand the image vertically and horizontally in colored pencil. Add words that might express what that image is saying to you.