Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2459 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Dawn DeVries Sokol (Tempe, AZ ) worked her way from designing newspapers to art directing magazines. From her studio she now designs books for publishers across the U.S. while playing in her art journals, crocheting and soldering.

Customer Reviews

How does one evaluate a person's soul?
How does a reviewer "Rate" or "Review" another artists' ART?
This was a difficult task for me, because as my 1st sentence stated, it's quite difficult to rate an Artists' personal Art.
Basically, it's like trying to evaluate a person's inner soul!

This book is so well photographed & so detailed and colorful! Dawn DeVries Sokol has done a beautiful job at displaying all the entries that she received while organizing this book of 1000 Journal entries.

The other amazing thing is that the entries that Dawn received were from all over the World! Therefore, it is so interesting to see how a journal writer is different from all others, and yet also the same, in that "we" (as a community of human beings) express ourselves in common ways as people! This book expresses this point very well---the soul of a person.

Dawn stated in her Preface that she chose not to categorize each Chapter by theme. But rather, Dawn chose to show the Journal entries as a continuum. In this way, Dawn has displayed the worldwide entries in a spiral fashion, rather than in a linear fashion...thus, each entry spiraled from one to the other.

Some Journal entries are sometimes "dark", sometimes sad, and sometimes happy. Such is life.
All are introspective.

When I read this book, I first of all went through each entry to look at the colors and artistic points. Then, the second time I went through this book, I looked at each Journal entry more specifically (often with a magnifying glass) in order to absorb the pages more thoroughly.

All in all, this was a very insightful experience, not only into the souls of the Artists and writers, but also into my own soul.

You can look at it again and again
...and you will see different things in the pages each time. I am one of the lucky artists in this book and I am amazed at the results. To put this much work together from so many artists had to be tough. My favorite aspect is the fact that there is so much diversity. Each artist bring their own voice to their work and it bounces off the other artist's work to create a harmony of color, shapes, images and words. ... Wow maybe that was a little too tooooo....but I want to convey that this lively book is a real treat to look at and a good source of inspiration for what ever art you do or enjoy. Great job Dawn. Thanks for including my work.

Incredible inspiration
Whether you use (or would like to start using!) an art journal to document your days or access and express your inner creativity, this book will inspire. It's so huge, by the time you finish you already want to flick through it again to remember your favorite pages. It's interesting to see the diversity of examples from other countries. Apparently when the project got up and running they were inundated by examples from people around the world wanting their work included in the book. While some pages are completely magnificent artworks there are also some very simple, playful, even childish pages - so you won't feel intimidated or dissuaded from taking up pen/paint and paper yourself, always a risk with these types of books - you can buy them in a bid to become inspired but actually end up the opposite! Not so here. There are naive scribblings that can be as insightful and interesting as beautifully designed masterpieces. This book will give you ideas and inspiration on two levels - technique and topics. Some pages have clearly taken hours and hours to complete, some are of a quick and simple style that seems easier to accomplish amid a busy lifestyle. Either way you'll get ideas. Then there's the dilemma of 'what can I write about?' From incidental observations to spiritual contemplation, you'll come across triggers and ideas in other people's work you might like to explore. And even if you prefer to just look at art rather than create your own, this is simply a beautiful book and reading other people's art journal entries can reveal sometimes intimate and always intersting glimpses into the creative process.