Beginning Art Journaling For Kids - Imagination Soup (2024)

by Violette Clark, author ofJournal Bliss: Creative Prompts to Unleash your Inner Eccentric.

Kids love to create art and if you give them a few tools and ideas on how to art journal they will go to town and come up with some colourful pages they will treasure for years to come! Beginning art journaling is great for young children as well as for teens.

Beginning Art Journaling

Kids can create a book to keep all of their beginning art journaling pages in one place. I like to use cardstock or cereal, pasta or cracker boxes for the front and back pages of some of my journals. Try using the clever cellophane cut-outs in some packaging and place a photo underneath like I did in this cover. The background was created by scrapping a few different folkart paint colours over the cardboard. Later I added some words and letters which I glued and stapled onto the cover. You can embellish your cover with squashed bottle caps, gems, glitter, trim or buttons.

The art journaling pages can be hole punched and binder rings can keep all of the pages together.

Here are 4 ideas on how to get started art journaling:

1. Painted backgrounds – you can make backgrounds ahead of time by scraping paint (folkart paint is great) with a discarded credit card or gift card onto a piece of cardstock. You simply squirt a couple of colours on the page and then with a credit card scrape the paint all over the page to cover it. Sponge, splatter paint, stamp on it with rubber stamps or easy to find mark making tools such as lids, the edges of credit cards, foam letters and numbers.

2. Borders – make fun borders ahead of time to make art journaling easy. You can create checkerboard borders, scallops, zigzags or whatever you like. Get ideas from magazines and on the internet by googling “art journal pages”. You can photocopy your borders so you can use them again and again!

3. Lettering – practise lettering by studying letters and fonts in magazines and books – try inventing your own style. Bubble letters and block letters are fun to try out – give it a whirl! The letters don’t have to be perfect.

4. Doodling and drawing faces – have the kids draw faces on separate pieces of cardstock. When they have come up with something they like have them ink it in with a permanent black pen. Have the kids practise doodling a variety of things that they like such as animals, trees, sunshine, houses, hearts etc. When they come up with images they like have them ink them in with pen. Colour images in with felt pens, crayons or pencil crayons. I like to create Long necked ladies as they are so much fun and easy to do. When your images have been coloured in cut them out.

Start putting your art journal pages together by choosing a background, cutting out a border and gluing it down with a glue stick or white glue.

Take a face or other shape you have drawn and coloured in and glue it to your page.

Now you are ready to add some lettering.

Do you want to create wavy lines around your image and write words with a pen inside the lines? Or would you rather create a talk bubble and write some words in that? You can cut out a talk bubble out of cardstock and glue it to your page. You can also write words on a separate piece of paper, cut them out and glue to your page. There are no rules in art journaling; anything goes.

When you have create a few journal pages hole punch them and put them together like I did in this book. Add ribbons, yarn and lace to the ring binders to fancy up your book! Enjoy filling up and showing off your art journal.

Bio:Violette Clark is an author, artist and creative catalyst living in B.C. Canada. She lives with her partner, Mr. G, aptly named for his tolerance of glitter! Violette’s book Journal Bliss: Creative Prompts to Unleash your Inner Eccentric is all about art journaling. Her DVD Teens Dream Journal Workshop shows teens how to create a fun and funky journal which will help them to capture their secret Dreams and express themselves more confidently. Check out Violette’s work at www.purplejuice.ca or her blog at www.violette.ca

KEEP READING

Art Journals with Kids

Beginning Drawing Books for Kids

Science Kits for Kids