An illustrated journal

If you've been following along with my blog recently, you'll have noticed a slight increase in frequency of posts and some of those posts relating to my various endeavours to keep the creative momentum going and I've got another one for you!

You'll also notice that this isn't the first post which starts with "I was watching a video on YouTube..." and this one is no exception. I recently watched this:

In the video, Danny Gregory talks about his discovery of another artist's illustrated journal, which inspired him to start his own. In turn, this has inspired me to start my own too.

I've been trying out journaling this year which is entirely in prose. Somewhere I can jot down thoughts or events with ease.

So why start another journal?

Well, it occurred to me that with journaling and keeping a commonplace book, I've been spending a lot of time only writing things down and not much time drawing. As my entries in both my journal and commonplace book are short, typically taking 5 minutes or less, I feel like I'm scratching a particular itch to get something down on paper and gives me a sense that I'm achieving something, even if I don't yet know what the end goal is.

Adding an illustrated journal and allowing myself to only work for a few minutes, if that's all the time available to me, it's giving me a chance to draw something as well as writing down a thought.

There are two added bonuses to this. The first is what I'm adding to my illustrated journal falls under the category of "I don't mind someone seeing this". My journal is private, somewhere just for me and I'd be pretty cross if someone was reading it. This one, however, is something I can share (if anyone wants to read it, that is). The second is it gives me something to draw. Sometimes, I don't know what to draw and the indecision can be crippling. Having a short journal piece as a jumping off point gives a bit of context to get a drawing done, even if it's just a basic observational drawing.

I've done my first two entries which you can see below. Whether I continue to do it daily remains to be seen.

I'm deliberately not being too precious about how I approach this. The aim isn't necessarily to produce a work of art each time. It just allows me another small space to express a thought.