Art Journal Collaboration between Claudia and me

Art Journal Collaboration between Claudia and me

Art Journal Collaboration with Angela and Claudia

As you guys probably already know: I’m  an Art Journal Lover! As a child I was drawing on loose pieces of paper, now I’m creating my own journals and am working in those. They both have their perks and disadvantages. But I just love working in journals to just play, experiment and keep track of my process. 

One thing led to another and Claudia (From Claudia’s ArtBarn) and I started an Art Journal together! In this blog post I will tell you all about this Collaboration. 

The start of our collaboration.

I saw two people do a collaboration together and it looked wonderful! I thought to myself how much fun they would have together! All these fun explorations and suddenly this beautiful book in your mailbox every now and then… I decided to just ask Claudia (we only know each other through instagram) if she wanted to do this with me. She is a very talented painter, check out her website! Click here

The first steps in this creative adventure

We decided to buy two Art Journals. One for Claudia, one for me. We gave the book a theme: nature. Claudia is working on ‘freedom’ and ‘birds’ and I am working on all things ‘trees’ (which in my opinion also includes birds, hah!). We ordered the journal a few days after this, another few days later it fell on our mailboxes. Then, we made our first marks on the pages. 

Every few weeks we ship our journals to each other. That way we can create a few pages, ship them, and continue creating in the other person’s journal! SO MUCH FUN. We will just keep this process going until we feel the journals are finished. 

What I learned through this project

Let me tell you a little bit about what I learned while working on this fun project. 

First things first: I am now a big fan of birds! haha. Claudia ignited my love for birds. I loved birds before this project: I have drawn and painted them, I collect feathers and I love to find nests and owl pellets. Now they seem to just keep flying onto my pages more and more often.

To work with Claudia is just so much fun! I believe it to be amazing to be able to see how she, this other artist, thinks. To see how she reacts to my work. To see how different her way of working is compared to mine, in a good way! When she doesn’t like something she just glues something on top of it. Me? I just leave it and call this page ‘ugly’ from now on and don’t bother looking at it again.

I took the opportunity to see my art in a different way when creating art along with someone else. In the beginning I found it really difficult to create something on the same page as Claudia has. To glue something on top of it. To sketch something next to it. I was scared to ruin her page and her beautiful collages, sketches and paintings… Now, a few months later, this comes to me with a little more ease. I like to believe there is more bravery to be found in my pages, not just in this Art Journal.

All in all, this is one of those projects I hold dear. 

What Claudia learned through this project

Let me give the mic over to Claudia for a second! 

“I was very happily surprised when Angela suggested this art journal project to me last year. It was something new to me, and it turned out to be an extremely valuable experience.

Working as an artist at home means working alone a lot. Even though we haven’t met in person yet, this journal project gives a feeling of being connected with a colleague and friend. Which turned out to be of extra importance to me during these times of lockdown. I really enjoyed getting to know Angela a bit through this journal. Maybe the fact that we haven’t met in person yet makes it even more interesting.

What I noticed is that even though we both chose our own themes at the beginning, they start to intertwine more and more and become more free. Suddenly more birds appeared on Angela’s pages, and I started exploring trees and landscapes more. The main focus for me is to play, explore, have fun and not be too scared of ‘ruining’ a page. Sometimes I feel like my page isn’t going anywhere and is getting “ugly”, but then after Angela worked on it I am happily surprised and know just what to do next. It really helps to move forward and take things in directions I would not have gone to by myself. 

Thanks to her I started exploring mixed media more, using different materials in my paintings like collages, dried plants etc. As a result I am recommending this project to everyone around me.

We are not done yet! I have a feeling it’s a project that is neverending in a good way. ”

Pictures of my Art Journal

I’ll place a few pictures from my art journal here. The fun thing is, a lot of these pages don’t even look like this anymore! They just keep changing as we keep adding things. It’s such a wonderful process

Video of Claudia her Art Journal

Here’s a flip through of a few of the pages in Claudia’s beautiful Art Journal. Enjoy watching!

I hope I informed you guys enough. I hope you loved reading about our collaboration. I hope you liked the images and little video. 

Thanks for taking the time to look at this! See you in the next blog post!

With love,

Angela and Claudia