A week of visual journaling

Recording daily life in my sketchbook

Lately I’ve been loving my Midori MD Notebook Light in B6 Slim, which I mentioned frequently using in my recent sketchbook awards.

Which sketchbook are you?

I am assigning myself a mission to completely fill one of these 48 page notebooks during my upcoming trip to Nice and Lisbon. To practice, I’ve been exercising my visual journaling muscles to see how I might want to document my days.

Here are my pages from the past week, with commentary and tips for visual journaling interspersed throughout! There’s some good, bad, and ugly—by sharing it all, I hope this post can give insight into how I approach improving after a “failed” drawing or page.

FYI, this section of the post will be accessible to everyone for a few weeks, after which it will be locked for paid subscribers only.

My first page was experimental, to say the least. (Ok yes, I think it’s plain ugly!) I drew the cover of an album I’ve been listening to all summer as well as ingredients in my morning smoothie in a colorful grid. Every so often I feel compelled to make a graphic, shape-driven artwork, then come up against my limits. But it’s fun to keep trying!

The page on the right is filled with observational drawings of people on the move in Astor Place, NYC. To draw people on the move, you need to have a reliable, intuitive way of how you draw people from various angles and postures. Though I’ve been going to figure drawing classes here and there, I haven’t practiced drawing people walking in a while. I can see the stiffness in all the bodies on this page.