This Week's Visual Journals

Week 23 of 2024

Highlights of this week:

• a 3 day trip in Paris visiting my sister and her family.

• travelling there and back, changing trains in London and seeing the magical Cornellisson shop there (like a Harry Potter shop for artists).

• having quality time with Mike, felt like an extended date.

• a gorgeous meal at a restaurant called Polidor.

• a walk through the flea markets.

• hearing hundreds of parakeets and sketching in Le Parc de Sceaux.

• coming home was also delightful, my parents did a great job looking after our boys and we loved being back with them again.

Reflecting on visual journaling process

Our trip to Paris wasn’t long (3 full days) yet I took in a lot, visually. On this occasion, these notes don’t reflect the poetry of the trip. My efforts to represent the beauty of our trip have failed a little. I thought these little business cards and tins and tickets were cute but the spread lacks magic. Was I too rushed and needed more time to reflect? Or maybe I needed more free play before filming this, a warm up of some kind? I’ve considered turning this page altogether and drawing something entirely different from our trip, much more loosely, maybe more plant-based, more green (maybe I’ll just carry this longing onto next week’s spread?)…

But I’ll leave it for now and share a few pics from the sketches I drew during the trip instead, also in THIS post, I talk through my process and the materials I used there. The sketching on the trip was a huge cause for celebration and I don’t want this spread to take away from that. One of my goals of the trip was to move from smaller pieces to larger sketches which I managed 5 times!

a few highlights of the trip

So here’s the thing, these weekly visual journals are challenging and tough and I want to explore why this is… and how I could relax a bit more while doing them. And I also would love for these journals to reflect the progress I’m making in my play sketchbooks but maybe that’s too high an expectation…

Ok, I’d love to hear your thoughts on journaling and recording moments. Do you journal, why? Do you have a sketchbook practice? Is it important to you? Have you tried visual journaling? What have your wins been? What are the struggles? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading x