How I started art journaling

As a child I was into drawing a lot (Rajacenna could have inherited a tiny bit from me lol); I was very fond of Walt Disney who, according to me, is a real hero being able to trigger the fantasy of every child and adult. 

Disney

I borrowed all the Disney books I could find from the library, poring over each page as I carefully studied the illustrations, and then spent hours at the livingroom table attempting to recreate every cartoon figure with my own pencil strokes.

I am not a true star in drawing like my daughter is, but I handle my way around with the pencil or marker and I’d say I’m pretty decent at sketching houses in various styles, inclusive whimsical cute ones. 

My entire childhood revolved around drawing, sketching, scrapping and journaling. It all began with a collection of Disney cartoons I created, accompanied by a handmade journal filled with everything I could find about Disney and cartoons in general.

When I was seven, I decided I was going to create my own history journal, but I got as far as one and then abandoned it entirely. Instead, I went all-in on making DuckTales journals, which, honestly, were way cooler. 

I’d cut out every scrap from the Donald Duck news journal pages, paste them into my notebook, and then fill the gaps with random text and extra scenes I made up, because apparently, the actual Duckburg universe wasn’t chaotic enough for me.

Celebrities

After my Donald Duck and Disney period I also started to collect all kinds of international actors and actresses images and glued them, at least their pictures, in several scrapbooks. 

Aside that I kept biography journals from Charlie Chaplin to Johnny Weissmüller (Tarzan) and from Shirley Temple to Goldie Hawn. 

I gathered all their information available from encyclopedias from the study hall in the library where I often just sat with my notebook and pen, writing the most important details and their filmographies. 

A completely different world from today, where your iPhone serves up every celebrity update faster than you can say ‘gossip alert.’ Also why on earth would anyone spend hours writing it all down by hand? I can’t even imagine living like that, mostly because my thumbs would probably fall off from all the manual labor.

Back then the bonus of searching and writing all kinds of celeb facts was that I became a walking Wikipedia and came to know probably all birthdays and filmography from many actors and actresses. I thought it would come in handy in case I would join a television quiz show or something crazy.

A lot of my days I spend, sitting on my bed armed with scissors, Pritt, scrapbooks and magazines.

Even the wall of my room at my parents’ house became one big junk journal where I put all the things I liked, tangled up with the medals from my Judo tournaments.

Another thing that was a “hobby” if mine, was to draw with markers on peoples faces and bodies in magazines; that was great fun. It was like becoming a plastic surgeon, but with zero qualifications and a glitter gel pen, and honestly, I think I was doing humanity a favor by giving every celebrity devil horns and monocles because how else will aliens know who’s in charge when they inevitably invade and start flipping through old copies of Vogue?

The most fun thing of my youth was to make journals with neighbourhood news every week which we copied and spread around the neighbourhood. 

My own newspaper at 12

At age 12, I took on the roles of owner, journalist and chief editor of my own newspaper, rallying other kids to join me as “outside reporters,” boldly stopping passersby to ask them all kinds of useless questions.

I liked journaling all the pieces together and adding stories to it, mostly because it made me feel like a wildly unqualified newspaper mogul, stitching together the world’s most important headlines (like “What’s in my lunchbox?” and “Why does our neighbor have so many garden gnomes?”) with a glue stick and blind optimism. 

It was less journalism and more me just wildly speculating on other people’s lives, which, in hindsight, was both deeply intrusive and also the most fun I’ve ever had ruining perfectly good notebook paper.

During my school period I turned all my agendas into one big smashbook with loads of doodles, stuff and pictures. My agendas were stuffed with so many things that they protruded out like a suitcase being closed by someone sitting on it while yelling, “IT’S FINE, IT’LL SHUT.”

Unfortunately I tossed them all out years ago during one of my infamous cleaning frenzies and where I convinced myself that throwing everything away was definitely the healthiest option. 

Normally I find it difficult throwing stuff away (not that I am neurotic), in every little piece of junk I can see the beauty of it, but I was ridiculously sick and when you’re sick, your brain makes you do weird things to pretend like you’re fixing it. 

Like purging all the things that bring joy for some illogical sense of control. Now I wish I’d kept them, but oh well.

Paparazzo

I started photographing when I was about ten years old with my own first real (now vintage) camera. It was one of those clunky, overly optimistic devices that required a ridiculous amount of patience and a roll of film you prayed you didn’t accidentally expose to sunlight. Or the danger of ruining your allowance on blurry pictures of your thumb.

Each picture was magic and an archive of my life, a collection of proof that I existed and that I saw things. Even if it was just the half-melted crayon that I swore looked like a dragon; every photo was like shouting into the void, “Hey, remember this!”.

I kept snapping away, like a tiny, unpaid paparazzo for my own chaotic life, because even then I knew someone needed to remember the time I built a fort out of couch cushions and almost got trapped forever.

When I was 19 I was hired for a big renowned publishing company as head editorial at a real magazine, which was something else than own a newspaper at 12 and fun to do as a real job.

Model daughter & KidsTV

In the mean time my photo albums and scrapbook really started to burst out when in 1993 my daughter was born. Of course during her childhood, like every parent does, we pictured and filmed her constantly. 

This I could extend when she got to be an official child model and got to act in series and films at the age of four. She worked for many big named companies and already earned real money at such a young age. 

I filled photo albums with thousands of real pictures until 2006, when I upgraded to my first digital Olympus camera. 

After that, my computer became a bottomless pit of photos, also the ones you normally should not have taken or kept when done with a real photo camera. 

Especially once I started photographing red carpet events for our KidsTV program, which I’d been producing since 2005 and we did with a real TV-camera. 

It was like my hard drive became a personal paparazzi archive; minus the scandal, but with way more awkward smiles from lots of celebrities.

Journaling had gone to the background for a decade or so, but I kept on collecting stuff from which mostly paper.

Although I was photographing a lot and had become entrepreneur in 1989, I never stopped drawing cartoons though. I have dozens of scrapbooks full with cartoon characters and also worked as a cartoonist in 2003/2004.

It was untill 2009 when my daughter brought me a wake up call to be creative again. She had the idea that I would be much happier when I should return where I left off: being creative. 

She herself had just discovered the most wonderful and outragious talent one could ever imagine so she knew exactly what she was talking about.

So after the entire digital world did his entrance and social media came into being, I registrated @artjournal right away when Instagram started and since then gave a podium to all other fellow creators of journals.