Tips for Keeping a Sketchbook or Visual Journal

Don’t worry about making perfect pictures in your sketchbook—focus on practicing your skills, recording fleeting thoughts, and capturing moments of life. It's more about the process than the product. If you happen to create an exceptional composition, that's great, but that is not the goal. Keep your visual journal projects fun and fresh with the following ideas.

• Mark up your pages ahead of time, so that you’re not facing completely blank white pages. Paint layers of color, draw lines, use a hole punch—anything to make them less precious, and enable you to be free with what you draw and create. (Check out the '15 for 30' prompts for this!)

• Notice everything around you. Nothing is too mundane to draw—your cup of coffee, the materials you’re using to draw with, squirrels at the park, a bike in a rack, or even a trash can.This is how you make your observational skills stronger. 

• Don’t edit yourself. Spend no more than 10 minutes on a drawing and don't go back and erase. Instead, restate any lines that you'd like to change.

• Try new materials. Don’t be stuck using the same old pencil. By all means, use it if that is all you have, but don’t be limited by it. Try different supplies, including forgotten markers and pens you may have lying around the house.

• Use color. Don’t just stick to black and white. Alternatively, it can sometimes be helpful to give yourself specific parameters, like only using brown, red, and gold, to see what you can do within those limits.

• Draw abstractly as well as representationally. Draw the same thing multiple times, becoming increasingly abstract with each drawing. Draw things up close so that they appear abstract, or draw small objects at a large-scale so that they go off the page and lose their context.

• Take a line for a walk. Do one continuous line drawing of ten different objects. Keep your pencil on the paper as you draw and connect one item to the next.

• Try a blind contour drawing. Look only at the subject and not down at your paper. It doesn't matter if the result looks like chicken scratch—this exercise will help you sharpen your observational skills. 

• Keep your sketchbooks and date your drawings to record your progress and artistic development.

Visual Journal Process Videos/Channels