First steps on the road of Art Journaling...

As some of you know already I'm a big fan of Julie Fei-Fan Balzer. She designs for Prima Marketing and Pencil Lines and is a great inspiration to me. I love her style of scrapping and especially her colorful art.
She is having an Art Journaling Week this week. Art journaling is something that was on my 'want-to-try' list for a while now. Julie is having a guest this week, Linda Tieu, who expresses exactly what I think art journaling is all about and why it is such a great thing to do. Please read her intro on Julie's blog here. So, after Julie's and Linda's inspirational words I decided to take my first steps...finally!...on the road of Art Journaling!
Because Julie was using watercolor paper and paints I dived into my stash. Far, far away..at the bottom of a box...I found some watercolor paper (I knew I had it somewhere...!) and to my big surprise I found a little box of professional Van Gogh watercolor paint too (completely forgotten about that one!). I wanted to have a starting point and just go with the flow after that, so I started with the same red circles like Julie did...and after that I couldn't stop any more. I kept adding color, drew some leaves, started stamping and stitching. I added some cut out leaves for some extra dimension, just like I did with the butterfly. And look at this butterfly! Normally it wouldn't have ended up on one of my scrapbooklayouts because it isn't perfect. I didn't want the colors to blend so extremely. Still, I used it...I forced myself to embrace imperfection (one of the things I hear Julie say a lot when I watch her live shows for Prima). And that's not easy being a perfectionist and control freak like me!
But that's what Art Journaling is about, right? It is just for me, no right's or wrong's, no one to judge me, no rules...just pure freedom to create whatever I want.
So guess what my first art journaling was about?

I took a piece of 8,5x11" piece of watercolor paper, folded it in half and just started painting...

And this is the result! Yeah!

Then I flipped the page, covered all the loose ends and the stitches of the embroidery with masking tape (which gave nice texture as a bonus!), put on a layer of gesso and made this page on one side: 

The text is a statement I bumped into while reading Linda Tieu's blog. I wrote it down immediately, because I so agree with her!! And again..I just started painting and see where it would end. And again..I had so much fun! It is so relaxing to create, without a goal, a reason or any rules...Creating only because I want to!

Thanks Julie and Linda!!!!