Starting the process

I have recently been entranced with the beautiful art journals floating around on the internet, at first I was all like "YEAH" LET'S DO IT!  Then I remembered that I have the artistic talent of a dead slug, yeah bummer.  While I love doing DIYs and trying out different crafty projects I am not very good at  sitting down with paint and random objects and creating something beautiful.  I have never been good at coming up with good scrapbook ideas, and I seriously CANNOT draw.  Even though I have all this stacked against me I kept being drawn to the idea and eventually I started watching youtube videos and reading more in-depth blog posts and I slowly realized that a lot of the journaling pages I am drawn to don't take a lot of drawing skills (hehe, pun not intended).  So I figured "Hey, that's one of my barriers torn down, that pretty much means that I am meant for the job!"  So for starters I am just going to use inspiration that I find online and just try to pretty much copy it.  That might be plagiarism but since this is just me trying to figure out if I can do this and I am not going to be selling it or anything I think it is ok, right?  I am also going to start trying to mix different ideas I have seen and just see where it takes me and see if I can do this.  For one thing I am usually not a fan of sappyness, and sappy girly quotes often make me gag so don't excpect to see a lot of that :D.  Also I am pretty cheap so I am probably not going to end up spending tons and tons of money on random art supplies unless I have fully researched it and found what is the best for my needs and skill sets.  I live in a pretty small town so as far as fancy pants craft stores we have....... Wal-mart, yeah, yeah, fancy.  So I am hoping to be able to get some random things at Flea Markets because we actually have two really good ones around here.  Tomorrow I am planning on going shopping to get a few starter things so that I can get started.  So here is my basic starter list of things that I am going to be looking for!
- Water colors (thankfully we already have some from an art class Mom tried to teach us once, yeah we never opened them :D, but they are actually nicer ones)
- basic craft paints (I already have quite a bit of this as well!)
- A book ;) (I am planning on finding an older thrift store book as a journal so I can use the awesome vintage printing show through on occasion and also they are cheaper.  I have ready that I should look for one that has sewn binding instead of glue and if I can't find one with thicker pages then I will use glue or Mod-Podge to glue every other page together to make each page a little thicker. If I can't find I good book I am going to look for an old piano book that is either spiral bound or sew bound because the pages are often thicker and I love the look of music scores as a back ground)
- If I don't use an old piano book as my journal than I want to get one to use for some background pages
- Mod Podge
- Random old cheap books that have cool poems in them or cool pictures (I'm thinking vintage children's books if I can bring myself to cut those up)
- Old buttons
- Letter stencils and any cute stencils I can find at Wal-mart
- Some sponge brushes for applying paint and stenciling
- If I have extra money some water soluble Oil Pastels
- As far as pens for writing on top of paint I read that Bic Crystal Ball-point pens are the best for cheap
- I also read that Bingo Markers from Dollar Tree are a good cheap alternative to spray paint you just poor the ink into a small spray bottle.
- A pack of colorful Dollar Tree tissue paper (to use for texture or to bleed to color onto a page)
- Candles or crayons to melt the wax and use as extra texture in a page (I already have enough of these to start and see what I think about working with them)

I think that is all the things that I am going to look for as of now
Another thing that I am going to start collecting that is pretty much free is any random scraps of paper that I get during the day, like a receipt from Flea marketing, an instructional list that I get while babysitting, tissue paper from a gift, a coloring page from a kid I babysit, the packaging on a new pack of pens, an old bookmark found in a library book.  Basically we come across a lot of different scraps of paper or cardboard in a day that could be easily used to inspire a whole page so I have a little zip-lock bag that I am going to keep in my purse to keep any sort of thing item that might be cool in my journal then when I am ready to sit down and begin the project I can get everything out and see what would actually be fun and what just needs to be trashed.

Check back soon for a list + pictures of what I actually ended up finding!  

Oh and if you are looking for some good well thought out blog posts about cheaper alternatives to the more traditional art journaling tools check out the Art Alchemist blog she has three really good posts about it that I found really interesting to read.