Journal Keeping for Calligraphers, Artists and Other Creative Spirits

Ideas come and go. Inspiration strikes at the most inopportune moments. Keeping a journal is a purely personal matter, but journals can take many forms.

In your creative life they can be somewhere to sketch ideas down when you don’t have the available materials to hand.
I have many journals for many things… here are a few suggestions…

Put pictures, jottings, pictures of colours that you particularly like, photographs, textures, line drawings, thumbnail sketches, Paint techniques, background techniques, try outs, nature pictures, quotations, inspirations.
Name your book:

Give your book a name, this will help feed your creative spirit.
Call it: Idea Catcher, Colour Therapy, From the Heart, Inspirations…. Think of your own.

Put anything and everything in your book that will become a useful reference for those times when ideas seem to vanish and all your creative juices are like a desert and in need of hydration. It’s also a great place to store all those pieces that didn’t seem to work out at the time, but be warned, pieces that looked unsuccessful at the time have a nasty habit of looking far batter once they’ve been locked away in a book and not see the light of day for a while.
For the serious journal keeper I suggest you write in your journal every day. If you don’t think you have time, use the time just as you wake, or sit down to your morning coffee or just after tea… give yourself permission to write, even if it’s only 15 mins and you can only manage a sentence. It will become second nature.

Personal Journals can be kept for lots of reasons also. A Dream Diary, A Gratitude Journal, Somewhere to off load the angst of the day, get it out there.

Years ago I did ‘The Artists Way’ its quite a commitment keeping up the morning pages and I’m not particularly a morning person either, but what happened over the course of 12 weeks was to unleash creativity in ways I could never have expected. Just giving yourself that half an hour or so means you never loose that idea that may one day turn into a great piece of work.
Start now. Use journals with plain pages in so that you can draw and sketch if necessary.
Choose a paper that will hold at least a bit of water if you fancy using watercolour paints.
Keeping a journal takes the fear out of having to complete a ‘perfect’ piece of work, if it does turn out to be spectacular you can always take the page out and mount and frame it, providing the paper is of good quality. Using good quality paper in your journal also makes you respect it a lot more too.
Above all….start today keep it up and see what happens!

What do you use your Journal for?
Do you have more than one?