My First Visual Journaling Spread of 2024

Week 1 in 2024. Join me as I start this new journal.

WEEKLY VISUAL JOURNAL

In this video I share my first visual journaling spread of the year. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to start a new sketchbook. This is a Talens Art Creation sketchbook. Today I’m sharing 2 videos, the first is of the watercolour base. I then made myself a cup of coffee while I let this dry. For the second one (20mins later) I’m using a little ink, a variety of pencils and markers.

Starting with the left side of a double spread, I’m writing an excerpt from a beautiful poem by C.S. Lewis called What The Bird Said Early in the Year. On the right side I record the days of the week and draw, letter and journal some of the highlights. I’ve had a cough all week so a lot of it is a bit of blur but trying to remember moments to draw was a great mental exercise. We had a great New Years’ Eve with friends and fireworks in our garden. And our first morning of the year was celebrated amongst the pines and squirrels in our favourite National Trust park nearby with church friends. The boys and I have watched a lot of StarWars (actually, I think it was all 3 trilogies!!) which was a treat. I drew this spread today without photo references but needed help to draw the StarWars logo so borrowed one of the boys’ books.

So here we are, I’m challenging myself to create these spreads once a week throughout the year with a hope to share more of my process here on Substack and I would love for you to follow along. Journaling is so good for so many reasons, I’m so excited to share with you some of them in coming months.

KEEPING PLAY SKETCHBOOKS APART

My plan is to keep this weekly visual journaling sketchbook separate from my other sketchbooks that are better suited for playing with materials, textures, taking notes from podcasts and scribbles of ideas for projects, sketches of anything while outdoors or indoors, or scenes from movies in evenings. These sketchbooks are messier and more raw. I plan to share these sketchbooks along the way as well.