Keeping A Cheap, Messy Art Journal: Why Chaos Beats Perfection, and How to Make Every Page Your Playground
If you’re still treating your sketchbook like a museum and not a mud pit, you’re robbing yourself blind. All those “pretty” Instagram journals? Carefully staged, curated, and edited within an inch of their sterile little lives? They’re nice for clicks, but they’re dead inside. The real art, the meat and bones, happens in the ugly, wild, gloriously cheap art journals you’re half ashamed to show anyone. That’s where the confidence grows, where the best ideas are born, and where your real, unvarnished story gets written in coffee stains, tape scars, and pages stuck together with God-knows-what.
Let’s be raw: a good art journal isn’t about beauty. It’s about permission. Permission to fuck up, to experiment, to waste materials, and to chase whatever weird impulse crawls out of your brain at 2 a.m. It’s the only place you can be 100% you and not give a damn about the audience.
Confession: My Best Sketchbooks Look Like They Survived a Riot
I have “journals” made out of clearance composition books, leftover spiral notebooks, ancient planners, even those bluebooks you used to bomb college exams in. Some pages are so crinkled and stained, they stick together like an old wallet. Inside? Some of the best ideas and happiest accidents of my career. If you’re not making a mess, you’re not making progress.
Step-By-Step: Rust Dawg’s Survival Guide to the Art Journal Life
Step 1: Use the Cheapest Book You Can Stomach
Forget Moleskine. Start with dollar-store spirals, composition books, old planners, or whatever’s on hand.
If the paper’s thin, glue two pages together or slap on a layer of gesso. Or don’t—let the bleed-through become part of the look.
The cheaper the book, the less you’ll worry about “wasting” a page. That’s creative freedom you can’t buy.
Step 2: Embrace Mess as Your Co-Author
Tape in ticket stubs, receipts, junk mail, and food wrappers. Glue down a coffee sleeve or a beer label from last night.
Let paint drip, smudge, and run. Blot with your shirt if you need to.
Write over your own drawings, draw over your own writing. Make every page a battleground.
Step 3: Mix Media Like a Madman
Use pencils, pens, markers, crayon, glue, spit, ketchup (yes, really), and whatever else you find.
Collage magazine clippings, napkins, cut-up drawings from your “fail” pile.
Layer, tear, and tape. Patch mistakes with scraps, or just go straight over them.
Ingredient Hack: DIY Pocket Pages
Tape or glue envelopes, paper pockets, or folded sheets onto your pages to stash secret sketches, notes, fortunes, or found trash.
Every pocket is a surprise, and a way to keep memories (or hide the really ugly stuff).
Quick Fixes for Common Journal Freak-Outs
Too precious? Scribble HARD on the first page. Rip it out, burn it, or spill coffee on it for good luck.
Pages sticking together? Embrace it. Pry them apart, redraw over the scar, turn the mess into a feature.
Paper too thin? Collage, gesso, glue another page on top, or just keep layering. Each fail makes the book thicker and meaner.
Personal Confession:
Some of my most “liked” paintings started as tape-stuck, paint-choked experiments in a battered old spiral. The mess taught me to let go. The journal made me fearless.
Dirty Truths: The Best Art Journals Are Ugly, Heavy, and Born in Chaos
People love to show off their pristine, minimal “bujo” spreads and grid-perfect washi-tape dreams. That’s fine—if your main goal is to be a Pinterest board, not an artist. But if you want your journal to work for you—to actually birth new ideas, wake you up, and slap you with breakthroughs—you need to get wild. A real art journal is thick, battered, and so heavy with glue, collage, and layers that it threatens to split its own binding.
Rust Dawg’s Advanced Survival Strategies for a True Madman’s Art Journal
1. Date Nothing, Title Nothing—Just Dive In
Start on the first page, the last page, the middle, wherever. Jump around, skip pages, tape things out of order. Let chaos run the show. You’ll find old pages later and see them with new eyes.
2. “Mistake Pages” as Fertilizer
Set aside at least one spread for absolute disasters. When you’re stuck or blocked, open to it and work on top of the mess. Collage over, paint out, write angry notes across it. The shittier it starts, the more gold you’ll find later.
3. Build Layers Until the Book Fights Back
If the book won’t close, you’re doing it right. Stack thick paint, thick collage, found objects. Let the spine break, then tape it back together with duct tape, washi tape, or whatever’s handy.
Ingredient Hack: The “Midnight Raid” Supply Drawer
Keep a drawer or box near your journal filled with weird trash: string, wrappers, bits of fabric, stamps, pressed leaves, broken jewelry, expired IDs.
When inspiration dries up, grab something random and tape or glue it in. Respond with a drawing or a rant written around it.
Why a Messy Journal Makes You Brave Everywhere Else
You don’t need a “vision” or a “theme” or a color-coordinated set. You need the freedom to suck, to ruin, to change your mind, to make something that only you understand. Your art journal is your arena, your laboratory, your therapy couch, and your diary—all rolled up in a fat, uncloseable chunk of memory and mayhem.
Personal Confession:
I’ve pulled more ideas, paintings, comics, and songs out of ugly art journals than I ever got from “finished” sketchbooks. When you stop treating your process like a gallery, the real breakthroughs show up.
Survival Wisdom: Rituals, Ruts, and the Pure Joy of a Journal Gone Mad
1. Make It a Ritual, Not a Chore
Set a timer—5, 10, 20 minutes. Open your journal, grab anything (marker, glue, sticker, lipstick), and attack a page. Don’t wait for the “right mood.” Make a mark, any mark. The journal doesn’t care.
Try “theme days”—draw only in blue, collage only trash, write everything backward, fill a spread with circles, or let a song lyric spill out in giant letters.
2. When in a Rut—Go Uglier, Go Weirder
Stuck? Flip to a finished page and vandalize it. Glue over something you loved, then draw new life on top of the ruins.
Copy a kid’s drawing, fill the margins with curse words, trace your hand and write what you’re thinking on each finger.
Draw your food wrappers, your medicine bottle, your cat’s butt—anything.
3. Honor the Mess: Catalog the Chaos
Once in a while, flip through and tag the pages that surprise you—“hot mess,” “hidden gem,” “WTF was I thinking?”
Date the page after you finish. Or not at all. Add a sticky note with a confession, a failure, a goal.
Let the book grow like a junkyard—layer on top of old, broken, failed stuff and see what survives.
Ingredient Hack: Tape, Tape, Tape
Masking tape, packing tape, duct tape, or washi tape—these are the skeleton and scars of a real art journal.
Use tape to repair, patch, hinge, frame, cover, or attach anything that falls out or rips.
Layer clear tape over text, then scratch into it with a pen for ghostly, graffiti effects.
Quick Fixes When You Panic About the Mess
Freaked out by a “ruined” spread? Splash water, drag a brush, or fingerpaint over it—then keep going.
Feel like every page is ugly? That means you’re doing it right. The breakthroughs hide under chaos, not perfection.
Lost your spark? Write a letter to your future self on a page you hate, then glue a new drawing on top next week.
Personal Confession:
There are entire months in my art journals where every spread is trash—until suddenly, I stumble onto the image or idea that cracks everything open. That’s not failure. That’s digging for gold.
Final Word: The Cheap, Messy Art Journal—Your Secret Weapon Against Perfection and Creative Death
If you’re not willing to make a mess, you’ll never make anything real. The beauty of a battered, ugly, overstuffed art journal isn’t in its looks—it’s in what it unlocks inside you. You become unafraid. You experiment without apology. You pile on the layers until the pages bulge and the cover peels, and you don’t care who sees the chaos. That’s what makes you dangerous. That’s what makes you unstoppable.
Your “finished” art will always be better if it’s born from a place where nothing is off-limits. Your next great style, theme, or project will crawl out of a pile of tape, collage, coffee rings, and confessions you barely remember writing.
Confession: I’d Burn Every Pretty Sketchbook I Ever Made Before I’d Give Up My Messy Journals
Because the ugly ones—the heavy, wild, overflowing beasts—are where the real growth lives. Every page is proof of work, proof of bravery, proof you showed up and made marks no one else could. When you go back years later and flip through those battered tomes, you’ll see every breakthrough, every dead end, every wild experiment. That’s your true story, right there in the ink, paint, glue, and chaos.
Ultimate Survival Wisdom: More Mess, More Magic, More You
Use the cheapest materials. Fill the ugliest book. Tape in trash. Write, draw, glue, and never stop.
When you feel the urge to make it “nice,” make it mean instead. Make it loud, weird, and thick with mistakes.
The art world doesn’t need another pretty book on a shelf. It needs your living, breathing, growling mess of a journal.
So get to it—rip, tape, glue, draw, write, confess, and let the journal become a living record of your wildest, rawest self.
See Also:
Keri Smith’s “Wreck This Journal” (the bible of destruction and discovery)
Sabrina Ward Harrison’s “Spilling Open” (diary-art at its finest)
Lynda Barry’s “What It Is” (the queen of creative mess)
#messyartjournal and #uglysketchbook on Instagram for solidarity, inspiration, and proof that chaos always wins