Hey there, it’s Kathleen here and today I want to share some ideas with you for how you can incorporate words and phrases in your art journal pages even when you don’t like your handwriting ( like me 😉 ).

You know, I always struggle with writing on my art journal pages because usually that’s the last step and when I really like the page so far, I always fear that I will mess it up with my handwriting.. (although the fear is not as big as with my scrapbooking layouts because in art journaling I am able to accept imperfections more easily).

Anyways, I had a look at the art journal pages I have done so far and here are some ideas that I found for lettering:

Stamping

You can either use single letter stamps to write a word or sentence or you could of course use a stamp with some word/phrase (and then you can also emboss it so it’s even prettier 😉 )

Alphabet stickers

This of course is one of the most obvious options but one that I really like because there are so many different types of alphabet stickers. Pictured in these art journal pages are thickers, normal alpha stickers and word stickers.

Magazine cut-outs

Here you also have different possibilities: you could cut out single letters from magazine titles, for instance. Or you cut out a whole title/sentence or use a whole magazine page.

Book pages or cut-outs

This one works similar to the mag cut-outs, maybe except cutting out single letters.

Die-cuts/ephemera

Lots of the pretty ephemera packages from the different scrapbook collections include word die-cuts (like the one on the right side in the photo above). I especially like the vellum ones 🙂

Print & cut out

This one is actually so simple that you might have forgotten about this option so far 😉 Just type out your text in word, select the font and size you like and print it out! You can then cut it in smaller strips, like I did here. Printing on vellum also looks really good!

Use your Cameo or BigShot

There are probably hundreds if not thousands of words ad phrases to be purchased and downloaded from the Silhouette online store that you can then cut out with your Cameo or Portrait. Or you could of course also use your BigShot (or any other similar machine).

Labelmaker

I really like this one! When I bought my labelmaker (I have this one – the great thing is that there are so many different colours for the tape and the label maker comes with two different alphabet disks, one uppercase and one lowercase with different symbols, like a heart, star, ampersand etc.)

Combine handwriting + stickers

This is an option I like to use when, for instance, I have a bit more to write so that it would be too much to spell the whole thing with alphabet stickers. So on the one hand it’s for pragmatic reasons but on the other hand I also just really like the look of it – the contrast of handwriting and stickers!

Alright, I hope I could give you some ideas for how you can include text in your art journal pages and you try some of them out! Do you have any other ideas or techniques?