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I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff lately about making your own sketchbooks and art journals, and I thought it would be a great use for some of the embarrassingly massive collection of paper I have.
I wanted to spread the process out over several days because we don’t need to rush, and it’s fun to take your time with a project like this because you can really think about the kinds of paper you want to use and how you want to put them together if you take your time. 
Today we’re just gathering supplies and materials.
Supplies for Making an Art Journal
The first thing you’ll need is a piece of cardboard. 
You could use a cereal box or a piece of paperboard, but I happened to have this nice thick cardboard that was already folded with a spine and everything (see, this project was meant to be), so I decided to use that.
Take some time to gather and select your papers. If you’re not a craft hoarder like me, you can use plain printer paper, cardstock, even lined notebook paper. 
I have some solid colored card stock (white and other colors), patterned paper of various sizes (you can even use scraps for this, they just make smaller “pages), some graph paper, a page pulled out of a magazine with pretty pictures on it.
You could use old maps, pages from books, coloring pages new or used, some of your kid’s old artwork you weren’t going to keep, newspaper… it’s all fair game. 
If you have large pages that need cut down to size, do that now, too, using your cover as your guide.
In the end how much paper you need will depend on how thick the spine area is for your book. Mine is about half an inch, so I need a lot of paper (yeah!). If you’re using a cut-down cereal box, you may only need a few sheets. 
If you have a large book like mine, you’re going to need to make signatures (fancy book talk for the individual sections of book pages that are bound together), which we’ll actually make tomorrow, but you can start sorting you paper into stacks of five or six sheets each if you like.
If you’re playing along with this one, I’d love to see your materials! Tag me with the hashtag #ourdailycraft and show me what you’re making!
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