Dreaming Big and Art Journaling

I am currently attending Traci Bautista's e-course called "Discovering Y.O.U." It is about marketing your art and it includes exercises that are meant to put together into an art journal.

I am pretty organized person and just could not crab some odd pages in different sizes as it was suggested. Instead, I chose an old book from my book shelf, downloaded Altered Books Tutorial from PaperClipping.com (which happened to be for sale just at that time) and started converting the book to the journal.

The book became very overwhelming in patterns and all. But it's so me, so I think it's ok. The papers and decorations are all my designs.

Here's the front cover:

And here's the back cover:

If you haven't seen enough patterning yet, here's the inside back cover. I have to take a deep breath before opening it!

First pages:

The exercises require quite a lot of thinking. Like this one: creating your own artist mission statement.

While making this I am constantly meeting the person I am most familiar with: my inner critic. She can be very discouraging, to be honest. Compared to scrapbooking, art journaling goes much deeper, and I almost hate it! My inner critic wants everything be controlled, black and white, clear-shaped ... bla bla bla.

When she's off, I browse the wildly patterned papers I've made for the book, giggling! How serious art journaling should be - I don't know! I am a total beginner in it!