Test Your Skills 2

Test Your Skills

Art Journal Quiz

It’s time to put an art journal page together! For this quiz I’m going to walk you through some art journaling design choices as I show you how I built a page from concept to finished product.

So to start, I’m creating a layout about the subject of love. One of my favorite verses talks about what love is and what love isn’t. I find the reminder so helpful that I wanted to put the words to page. I’m using one of the class templates as my starting point for this layout.

Choose A Photo

In the class video I talked about how an art journal page does not need a photo, but in this case I really wanted to use one to help portray the idea of love. In the end it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

Here are three images I had narrowed my options down to:

Option A: Flower

Option B: Silhouette Heart

Option C: Love Light Sign

Which one do you think might work the best?

SEE MY CHOICE

To be truly honest, none of these photos are bad, but I decided they were not equal choices.

Opt B is the photo I really wanted to use. I love the idea of the silhouette and thought it would contribute to the artsy feel I knew my page would have. But, when I placed the photo into the mask, I found that the photo was no longer as readable as I would like. I was worried people would look at the photo and wonder what it was because the arms were cut off and not visible due to the size of the mask.
Opt C—the love light sign photo—was my next choice. Then I noticed that the focal point of the photo was very close to the bottom edge of the photo. I knew this would present a problem when clipping it to the mask I was using (as you can see) so I went to my third option.
Opt A—the flower image—worked better than I expected! The focal point was in the middle so it worked much better within the mask. And the idea of giving a flower portrayed the idea of love without necessarily bringing romance into it.

Choose A Background

The next design choice we have is about the background. I’ve already picked the main paper I plan to use but I had some choices on which background paper to put behind it.

Option A: Dark paper behind main background

Option B: Medium paper behind main background

Option C: White paper behind main background

Which one do you think might work the best?

SEE MY CHOICE

Option A and C again, aren’t bad or wrong. In fact, until I finished the page, I was dead set on using the dark paper. What I liked about the dark paper was that it helped give my square layout a more defined space. But the reason I chose not to use it was because even though it was helping define the space, it was also making the image feel more heavy or weighed down. Option C wasn’t used for the opposite reason. I didn’t want to use the white paper because it made my page feel washed out or lacking definition.

Option B was just right. It wasn’t too heavy or too light and it blended very well with the other paper I was using.

Choose Supporting Elements

When it comes to elements, which choice do you think best fits the style of art journaling?

Option A: More traditional elements

Option B: Stroke/paint elements

SEE MY CHOICE

While the use of traditional elements (Option A) on an art journal page isn’t unheard of, it is much less common. Using traditional elements can still be used effectively to create a beautiful scrapbook page. But if you want your page to have more of an art journal feel, using elements that are more flat in nature (Option B, like paint, pen strokes, and other artistic elements) will better achieve that look.