Visual Journaling Inspiration No. O1 / The Beginning

 

 

Visual Journaling Inspiration | The Beginning

Journal Entry No. 01

 

Welcome to a new series here on the blog that shares my journey with visual journaling. With 2025 marking the start of my seventh year of doing it. It only seemed fit to start this series and reflect on those six years of daily sketching. With lots of memories preserved and lessons learned along the way. These series will take you into the heart of it all.

 

The Beginning:

My journey with visual journaling was completely a serendipitous one. One I started in an attempt to hold myself accountable for showing up and sketching daily. This year marks the start of the my seventh year of doing so and I wanted to share bits of the journey while reflecting on how it evolved over the years.

Back in 2018 I wanted to do something about the habit of sketching daily when life was too busy to go out and sketch. I came across a post on instagram where someone used a daily dated diary to sketch on it and thought that was it. The perfect way to do it. Tiny dated page that allows for a sketch of a 10 minute duration. Short, fast and doable. I went online and purchased the little diary only to have it sitting on my shelf un opened. It was only in 2019 that I bought a new but this time I committed to the practice. Should you want to really travel back in time here is one of my earlier posts on the subject.

Showing up:

Now having a plan didn’t mean following it. Wanting to do it was something and actually doing it was a totally different story. So in my beginnings I used to skip days and batch them to re do in an afternoon on a weekend. As long as they were done, I felt accomplished. I wanted to mention this here because it is hard to start a habit and commit to it. So if you fall off the wagon just give yourself some grace and re fill the pages that you left out whenever you can. For me it was only few years in of visual journaling that I managed to have it setup in a way where I am doing a page per day. Everyday.

Keeping it up:

To be able to keep things going I needed to find ways of adding the sketching into my day to day life. I have another blog post about my setup and how I designed my kit and my space to work around me so I am more likely to do it as opposed to skipping it. This setup and kit has evolved and changed over the years but the concept is the same. At some point in my life it moved to happen in my car while waiting for my daughter to get out of school, or during rehearsals. Other days on my sofa while watching a movie with my family. As long as I could fit my habit around my daily life it meant I was going to do it and commit to it. Fast forward I am on book 7!