How Can Art Journaling Help You Document Personal Growth and Change?

How can art journaling help you document personal growth and change? By giving you a place to capture the parts of your story that don’t necessarily come with a photograph or a special occasion. A change of heart. A new direction. Something you’ve finally figured out. Or maybe the realization that, even after all these years, you’re still figuring things out. Still Changing Collection grew from that idea: that being unfinished isn’t something we need to fix. It’s simply evidence that we’re still learning, adapting, reinventing and becoming.

Still Changing Is a Collection About Becoming

One of the things I love about art journaling is that you don’t need a big event to give you a reason to create a page. Sometimes the story is simply what’s going on inside your head.

Maybe you’ve started doing something you never imagined yourself doing. Maybe something that mattered enormously ten years ago doesn’t seem quite so important anymore. You may be navigating a transition, trying something new, letting something go, or looking at your life from a slightly different perspective. Those stories matter, too.

That’s really where Still Changing began. I wanted to create something that celebrated the idea that we never have to declare ourselves finished. There is always room for another interest, another adventure, another opinion, another creative experiment, another version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

A Little Messy, a Little Imperfect, and Very Much Alive

Visually, Still Changing is full of the things I love to use in my own digital art journaling: worn and torn papers, paint, scribbles, gesso, stitching, stamps, butterflies, hummingbirds, sketched women and plenty of words. Nothing is supposed to feel too perfect.

The torn edges, unfinished marks and overlapping layers are part of the story. They let you build pages that feel collected and lived in, rather than carefully arranged and polished within an inch of their lives.

And because everything is digital, you can make as much creative mess as you like without washing a single paintbrush. There are definite advantages to this digital art journaling business!

What’s Inside the Still Changing Collection?

The complete collection brings together four coordinating packs: the Still Changing Digital Art Journaling Kit, Worn Torn Paper Pieces, Paint, and Journal Papers.

The main kit gives you the heart of the collection, with 22 backgrounds and 127 elements, including flowers, butterflies, hummingbirds, frames, stamps, paint, gesso, stitches, sketched women and 43 words for helping you tell your story.

The coordinating packs give you even more room to play. There are 21 worn and torn paper pieces for building layers, 23 separate paint elements for adding color and texture, and 16 notebook-style journal papers in 12×12, U.S. Letter and A4 sizes.

You can certainly use the packs individually, but together they give you a wonderfully big digital playground for mixing, layering and experimenting.

You Don’t Have to Make an “Art Journal Page”

This may sound a little strange coming from someone talking about an art journaling collection, but you really don’t.

Still Changing works just as well for traditional digital scrapbooking.

Start with a photograph and use a torn paper behind it. Add some paint beneath your cluster. Tuck in a butterfly, a word strip or one of the sketched elements. You can add three sentences of journaling or three paragraphs. The page can be about a major turning point in your life, or about the fact that you finally learned to grow tomatoes.

There are no rules about which stories qualify.

You can also skip the photograph completely and start with one of the journal papers, a few words and whatever catches your eye. Layer things. Move them around. Change your mind. Cover something up. Add something else.

That sounds rather appropriate for a collection called Still Changing, doesn’t it?

Your Pages Can Change Right Along With You

One of my favorite things about looking back through old scrapbook and art journal pages is noticing things I probably didn’t recognize when I made them. They become little markers of who I was at that particular moment. And that includes the ordinary pages as much as the profound ones.

We tend to think we should document the milestones: birthdays, weddings, vacations, graduations. Of course those stories belong in our scrapbooks. But I also want to remember what interested me, what made me laugh, what I was learning, what I struggled with, what I believed and what I was dreaming about along the way.

Those are the pieces that show how a life actually unfolds.

More Art for Stories About Change

If this is a subject you’d like to explore even further, Express Yourself: Change coordinates beautifully with Still Changing. The two collections approach the same broad theme from different directions, so you can mix pieces from both when you want even more choices for pages about growth, transition, reinvention and becoming.

Still Changing, Still Creating

I discovered my own creative side later in life, which may be one reason this theme means so much to me. There’s something rather wonderful about realizing there isn’t an age when we’re required to stop discovering new things about ourselves.

So make the page about who you used to be. Make one about who you are today. Make one about something you’re still trying to figure out. 

Or open a blank page, throw on some paint and see what happens.

After all, we’re still changing.