What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
As someone that sells identifies as a perfectionist, I sometimes have a really hard time engaging in creative hobbies because I put a lot of pressure on myself. I love the process of painting and crafting, but for a long time I avoided doing it because it was more stressful than it needed to be. With the added stress in this leisure activity, something that was supposed to be relaxing, became more like work and was not enjoyable.
When I do arts and crafts with the kids at work in my paediatric occupational therapy practice, I always find so much joy in doing the most simple thing like basic collages, painting very simple pictures, or even just colouring with them. I find that sometimes as an adult, we put a lot of pressure to make all activities in our life productive, and having some sort of purpose to them. As children, we often don’t care about the final product, but just about the enjoyment of the process. Sometimes it shocks our placement students or new staff when they do art with the kids and then the kids don’t care to take it home. I like to call this process art, and I think it’s something that we need to bring into adulthood to enjoy life more.
In the last little while, a big trend that is present on social media is people sharing their junk journals, art journals, and crafting hobbies. When I came across people doing junk journals on TikTok, it made me realize that as an adult I can just do art for fun or for a mindful activity!
I find that doing art in a notebook where I can just close or turn the page after I complete it, has taken away a lot of the pressure to create something cool or beautiful in the time that I am crafting. I don’t spend tons of money on material and I like to try to keep my art as basic and as abstract as possible so that I don’t get caught up in the final product.
If you feel like any of this connects with you and you would like to start an art journal, my biggest recommendation is just to start. You could get caught up in so many videos of people collecting junk or sharing the best tools to use and you may put off starting because you don’t have the right stuff yet or you don’t have the money to invest in things. Remember, anything can be art if you allow it to be!
Most of my supplies are from the dollar store, such as markers, glue sticks, and different tapes and papers. I have some nice markers that I bought from Amazon that weren’t super expensive and sticker packages as well! But you can have the most basic materials and create some really cool stuff! When my sister and I went to Greece a couple weeks ago, I only brought a very minimal amount of markers from the dollar store and glue, And my sister and I found different junk that we used to glue down into our books to add to the art each day. I even figured out how to use water and markers to create makeshift water paint!
My biggest recommendation for anyone that wants to start doing an art journal is to try to practice collecting material and then creating something in the moment. Don’t find an inspiration photo or something that you want to emulate, just imagine you are a small child cutting and pasting and coloring For the joy in the moment and then close it up and put it away! It can be very overwhelming to start, but after a while you get into the practice of a mindful artist! Happy creating!
Here are some of my art journal videos on TikTok if you’re interested!
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMhBtsnAe/
Be Your Own Sunshine 