Wreck This Journal vol. 1

I mentioned a while ago that I bought a new Wreck This Journal to start, and I'm finally sharing my first update! I bought my first Wreck this Journal in high school and filled out maybe 1/4th of it, and forgot about it for years. I recently pulled it back out, and decided I wanted to buy a new, blank one. If you're not familiar with the journal, there are prompts on every page for different ways to "wreck" the journal. For example, some of the pages say to rip it, burn it, rub dirt/food/paint everywhere, etc. It's super cool because it totally pushes you out of your boundaries and inspires creativity. I've decided I am going to use it as more of an art journal, using some artistic liberty with some of the prompts. 

One of the main reasons I wanted to start a new one was to help me with my anxiety. This year, my anxiety has really spiked and has been SO much worse than it has been before. I find myself worrying about everything constantly, and even if I'm not consciously worried about something, I am still very anxious and on edge most of the time. Keeping a journal has been something I've done throughout my whole life to combat this and I absolutely love the idea of an art journal. So, this is kind of like my art therapy journal. I'll be sporadically posting updates as I continue to start and finish pages. Here's what I have so far!

Finished Pages:

This was the first page I did. I have coffee at least once every day, so it totally made sense for me to do this page first! It's nothing special really, but I will not lie- it was pretty fun flinging coffee around, haha. Also, I leave coffee stains everywhere, so this was the one time I could sit my cup down and not worry if it spilled over!

This page is one I'm pretty proud of! It's kind of a funny story with this page- in my first Wreck this Journal in high school, this was one of the pages I finished first, too. But at the time, I had barely any art supplies (or art abilities, for that matter), so I did a design with crayons that was pretty similar to this one. And as the years went on and I kept looking back on that page, I kept thinking "man, that would look so much better with watercolor paint." So when I bought a new journal, one of my first thoughts was to re-create that page with watercolors. It's not the cleanest, mostly because I wasn't really trained in watercolor painting or it's techniques, but I love how it came out!

In Progress:

One of the first pages in the book has lots of lines to write your name in various ways. I didn't want to include a close-up of this page because it has some of my personal information on it, but I also started doing some doodling around the edge of the page, using mostly sharpie markers.

I got the idea to cover this whole page in mandalas/circle designs. I started out by tracing different size circles and building the design from there. The circle on the right was my first one, and the one on the left was the one that I tried to freehand (pro-tip: never try to freehand a circle. It will turn out like this.) I almost didn't want to post this because I think that left circle looks super wonky, but I am also trying to let myself fail with this project. There is no way that I could make everything in this journal turn out exactly how I imagine it, so I am embracing the mistakes. First I wanted to do this page in only sharpie markers, but I didn't like how there wasn't much contrast in the colors. Then I decided to add in the use of watercolor pencils, which definitely adds more depth and color gradients.

Have any of you ever done/finished a Wreck this Journal? I'd love to see some of your pages!