Illustrated Journaling

I haven't written much about writing lately on this blog.  It occurred to me that one of the best ways to write is to keep a journal.  I have started journals before, but usually abandon them.  I love to do image searches in Google for "illustrated journals".  The results are always very inspiring.  I began to think about this this week and I thought I might try my hand at an illustrated journal.  I've always had the misconception that one had to be a really good artist in order to keep a journal, but that thinking has changed for me.  Some of the images I found on the Internet were very good, but some of them really did not show a great artistic talent.  I mean no disrespect to the artists, just that it doesn't really matter if a person is a good artist or not.  They can still keep an illustrated journal.  The good thing about this is that if we can manage to write and draw in it most every day, we will surely get better as time goes on.  I do not consider myself an artist, per se.  Not a good one anyway.  I always compare myself to others and always come up very short in my own mind.  I decided to just wing it and not worry about it.  So, I have a couple of pages here that I will post, so you can see what I mean.

First, I would like to talk about the type of journal I'm using.  In the past, I have bought several journals and sometime back I bought a Moleskin journal with blank pages.  This one is about 5" X 8".  It has plain pages for sketching, drawing and colored pencil work.  I tried watercolor and that didn't work very well, so I've decided to stay with colored pencils.  Once I draw my image, I color it in with colored pencils and then outline in black with a Micron pen 05.  So far it has worked well.

 

 

This first page I did last night and I decided to make my journal entry about vanity tables.  As I said, I'm not a great artist, but I don't think it turned out that badly.

The next page I did today, and I did it on Kumihimo bracelets that I've been making.  I decided to try to draw one of the bracelets.  Again, nothing great, but not too bad.

As long as I don't obsess over the drawing and continually compare myself to others, I think this will be a very useful tool for me to improve my writing and drawing.  It will also be something I can go back and look at that will make me happy.  You might try the same thing.  Just go to Google and do the search "illustrated journals" and you will get tons of photos and inspiration.  You'll also probably find some blogs that talk about how they journal and what types of mediums they use.  Very inspiring.