Hi all.  This is Erin back with another look at Art Journaling for Beginners.

This month I am going to combine two of my favorite things in the world – art journaling and pocket scrapping.  Did you know you can art journal in pocket style?  Well you can! For folks who are just starting out in art journaling, or who, like me, find that time is not always friendly towards our arty inclinations, pocket art journaling is a great middle ground.  And it is easy to get started.

I like to use templates in my pocket scrapping, and that holds true for Pocket Art Journaling.  However, I tend to make my Art Journals and my Scrapbooks different sizes for various reasons.  Now when Pocket Art Journaling you can use any 12×12 pocket template and it will work just fine.  I, however, find that 12×12 is a bit overwhelming for me so I either use an 8.5×11 template, or I cut a 12×12 template down.  For those of you who do not know how to cut a template down here is a quick run through of how I cut my templates down.

First I find a template where the photo masks are lined up in a way that will make it easy to crop the canvas down to a more manageable size.  For today I chose the Life Captured April templates because there is a nice gutter running down the center of the page making it easy to crop it into two 6×12 halves.

First, open the file in your editing program (for me that is PSCS 6).

Then duplicate the canvas (Image>Duplicate on the menu bar) you should have two canvases of the same template.  ( NOTE – Some programs allow you to rename your canvas here – if yours does, I suggest you rename it now so you don’t forget later and accidentally save over your original.)  Now go into one template canvas and select the crop tool.  Slide the handle over so one of the 6×12 sections is highlighted and the other is cropped.  You might have to zoom in a bit to see clearly what you are doing.

Now crop the image.

Go through your layers and delete any layers that no longer exist, are no longer visible, or any layers where only a small sliver is still visible.  You can then select your remaining layers and move them around on your canvas to even up your margins as you need to.  When you are finished it should look something like this.

Now you are going to select File>Save As and rename the template as you wish. DO NOT just use SAVE as you might accidentally save OVER your original template and we don’t want that.  You should also add in the File>File Info menu the credits for which template you used so you don’t forget. For mine I added Life Captured April by Digital Scrapbook Ingredients – so I will always know where my original template came from. (You could include that information in the rename as well if you prefer)

Now repeat the same process with the duplicated template canvas, but this time save the other 6×12 side of the template.  This will give you two different 6×12 templates to get you started with Pocket Art Journaling. You can go through and make as many as you like, but my second one looks like this.

Now obviously not all templates will have two usable sides, but most will.  Some people prefer to only have one template to work with so all of their pages have some consistency, which is certainly fine too. In addition, you can further play with the templates all you want.  Perhaps you don’t like the tall look of 6×12. Instead you can crop it further down to 6×8 like this using the techniques above.

So now we have Pocket Art Journaling templates ready to be used and we can go to town.  Just like in any Art Journaling, there are really no rules.  The idea is to express yourself in a way that pleases and inspires you.  For this month I chose to use DSI’s All Year Round September.  We have made some changes to our schooling this year and it has been a really stressful two weeks because of that.  It is one of those “blessings and curses” times for us and I needed to vent a little, and wanted to capture the moment for future reference, so this kit was perfect.

Here is the page I made, and for those who are curious about the difference between 6×12 and 6×8, I did the same page in both sizes just to give you an idea of what you might like better.

6×12

6×8