Art journal blog

9 ways to add text to your art journal

Get Messy is an online art journaling school that teaches you to cultivate your creativity. Without perfection.

We’d love for you to join us.

Blog Categories

For many of us, images come most easily when we’re art journaling, and for others working with text feels more natural. Being a wordy, languagey, writer-type, I am definitely one of the latter. That being the case, I want to show you some of the different techniques I have for adding text to my art journal pages.

To do this I’ve made a mini art journal, and I’m going to take you through how I filled it in the video below. I’ll give you a list of the products I used, but you should not feel that you need to have all of these in order to make a journal like mine. Just take what you’ve got in your stash, and use it to play, experiment and improvise.

Supplies

  • Stamping ink
  • Stamps
  • Acrylic paint
  • Old book pages and image plates
  • Pencil
  • Embroidery floss
  • White gesso
  • Heidi Swapp Color Shine
  • Alpha stickers
  • Phrase stickers
  • Tracing paper
  • Scrapbooking paper
  • Coloured tissue paper
  • Old envelope
  • Stapler
  • Sticky tape
  • Scissors
  • Waterproof pigment liner
  • Needle
  • Piercing tool and mat
  • Glue pen
  • Double sided tape

The 9 techniques you’ll see in the video are:

  • Using text as a pattern element
  • Stitching on paper
  • Using phrase stickers and alpha stickers
  • Repeat stamping to create backgrounds
  • White out poetry
  • Muting printed text to use as a background
  • Bold hand-cut collage text
  • Using the transfer method to create text pieces for layering
  • Making space hidden journaling

Let me challenge you to give one of these techniques a try in whatever art journal you’re working on right now. Share the result on Instagram so your fellow Messians can admire your work!

Essie Smith

Essie is basically a Unicorn. She has healing powers, magical properties, and she refuses to be handled by men.