This Week's Visual Journaling

Week 2 of 2024

Today I’m sharing 3 videos, two of the journaling process at my desk and one of a little treasure I found while on one of my daily walks, some gorgeous dried hydrangeas. I had my tiny Moleskine sketchbook with me so made a quick sketch on location, using my Blackwing and Prismacolor bronze pencil.

These remnants of hydrangea flowers cheered me up no end, on what was a drizzly day. Being sensitive to a lack of sunshine in winter months, I need to walk everyday. I never EVER regret going out but some days are brighter than others and this one was grey and dull but not the nice romantic type. So when I saw these dried flowers, they were like little gifts, little treasures of ochre and gold popping out. This is what I’m featuring on my left page this week. If we get frost in coming weeks, I’d love to go back to see them in even more splendour.

Before starting this week’s spread, I placed a page from a small magazine under the left page to protect last week’s spread from pencil marks and rubbings.

After starting, I liked my first sketch on the spread but it got messy/cluttered so I added gouache to start over and did the process of drawing details again using a General’s Layout black 555. I’m much happier with it now and find it’s much more reminiscent of my experience of finding the dried flower and foliage so clear against the grey sky.

On the right page I’ve recorded the days of the week with a few key illustrations. Like last week, I made these smaller drawings from memory, apart from the yellow ticket which was handily already on my desk. I was overjoyed to find it while declutterring my studio as it was from my student days in Ottawa, Canada (20 years ago this month). This ticket was for a talk by Margaret Atwood on her book Alias Grace. I’m hoping to use this little ticket as inspo for something I can’t wait to share with you.

Some other highlights have been having the fire on in the stove again (we had run out of wood), making a lovely sweet potato soup (that has an apple in it), and then even working with these colours today has also felt quite lush. I’ve just noticed I smudged the right page (in the Wednesday section) which I’ll try rubbing out but I’m not too precious about that. I’m under no illusion that this sketchbook will get a little dirty throughout the year.

Thinking about materials, would you find it helpful for me to list what I’ve used?

I hope you’ve had a good week.