I have been working on a collaborative challenge project with Tina Walker, designer, and collaboration columnist for StencilGirl® Stencils and a group of other awesome creatives. When I saw the initial call for participants I jumped at the opportunity because I enjoy branching out creatively and I have never stretched myself in this way. I also knew it would fit wonderfully with a project I was already working on, but more about that later.

The challenge was to begin with the primary theme of A to Z art journal pages, and to determine a secondary theme to tie all of your A to Z pages together. The one caveat was that we could not duplicate someone else’s secondary theme. I selected to do an A to Z Exploration in Textures. 

After choosing my theme I then went on to incorporate an additional challenge for myself. I decided to add some kind of “pocket” to every letter layout. Next I put together an initial A to Z list of textures. Wow! Coming up with textures for some of the letters was kinda tricky! Once I had the details ironed out, I now had to determine what type of journal I was going to work in.

Since I would be dealing with a large variety of textures, I was going to have a very chunky journal in the end. Seriously, who doesn’t love a good chunky monkey journal? However, due to the chunkiness I knew most pre-bound types of journals on the market would not work. Luckily, I had come across a vintage 45mm vinyl record bound album. I decided with some slight alterations this would work as my template. I pulled it apart, altered the measurements to fit my needs and created the pages out of 140 lb watercolor paper. I created the binding out of chip board. My original spine was only 2¼” and at about the halfway point of creating my layouts, I was way beyond the first, itty-bitty spine and had to create a new one at a whopping 4½”.

Another aspect to the journal was videotaping its creation. So, I documented through video all the layouts and released them to my YouTube channel. Below is the full playlist of the complete project.

For the complete blog post by Tina Walker and view all the beautiful works done by the rest of the collaborative creatives you can go to the StencilGirl® blog HERE. Additionally, I created a download with ideas for different textures you could explore in your artwork. Click the button below to download it.

The A to Z Exploration in Texture was featured in the Winter 2021 edition of Art Journaling Magazine. Click on the image if you are interested in purchasing a copy of this edition.