Journaling--Electronic and Hardcopy

When people ask me why I blog, I tell them I do it for myself.

Surprisingly, I find it very motivational to make a record of what I'm doing. I find myself checking back to see what the date was when I finished a certain piece or to read the details of a process that I may have forgotten. Needing to post something semi-regularly keeps me looking with a fresh eye for something I've done that might be of interest.

I do keep many hardcopy journals, both a handwritten mind dump, a la Julia Cameron's morning pages, as well as design sketchbooks and idea journals with brainstorming on words to describe my work or artists whose work I admire and an analysis of why.

Recently, I've felt drawn to construct a more artistic journal, with a slightly different slant. I've long admired Teesha Moore's journals. You can view a plethora of pages on her website. When she recently posted YouTube videos of her process, from building the journal from watercolor paper, in a process I've done many times, to paint, collage, penwork and lettering, I found myself re-energized to try this.
Here's Part 1 of 4 on lettering, but there are a total of fourteen videos to guide through the entire process.



Now Teesha's style is unique, and I've no desire to copy it per se, but I did use her guidelines to quickly construct and paint a small journal. I thoroughly enjoyed the mental switch of tearing up stacks of magazines looking for colors and textures that would accent my paint.


Now I'm working on finding bird images to collage and doing some drawings of my own bird imagery. I find the journal surprisingly addictive and look forward to starting to pen my collected bird quotations into its pages.

In my recent travels to see my ailing mother, my drawing sketchbook and this journal were the sum of my creative efforts. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because I had limited opportunities, but as always, I think the cross-fertilization of working in many media is beneficial to all. I can't wait to see where this new endeavor takes me.