A generalized search on the internet about visual diaries or art journals, brings up a lot of people who use scrapbooking to record inspirational messages or just their thoughts. In the YouTube flip throughs that I watched, there is a lot of playing around with texture and layering of paper and paint. Some incorporate drawing some don’t. The creators sometimes depict real experiences or scenes from their day or they simply stick in ephemera from their life, but that also seems optional.

Many people seem to keep an art journal as a therapeutic activity, something creative to disconnect them from the everyday grind. I stumbled upon a video by Kristal Norton who has a course about journaling and what she keeps repeating is that the journal doesn’t have to be perfect and that “you should do it for the freedom, the expression, the play.” She uses a regular composition notebook that she reinforces to journal into and stick pages into.

Some people like to work in their journals one page at a time, taking time to make it perfect. And others like to complete the journal by starting out pages, not finishing them, and then coming back building on them over time.

As far as I can tell, an art journal is more about journaling thoughts and processing emotions and a visual diary is more about journaling actions and real life happenings. Though a diary can include thoughts and emotions too.

Art journals include more found ephemera than visual diaries. Art journals tend to be more centered around playing around with texture and paint and stamps.

A visual diary is something used by a type of artist or designer to record ideas and/or their day with the purpose of incorporating those ideas into future projects, while an art journal is a therapeutic tool that can be used by people who are not necessarily artists.

Looking for visual diaries on YouTube, I also found diaries in the form of film. They can be a video recording with clips of a certain period from the filmmaker’s life. They may depict an event or a cool trip, other times just containing everyday things like cooking, shopping or eating, and people and things they love. Or small moments of them dancing with their pet or recordings of interesting buildings or plants or textures or tricks of light they came across. The same can be said for photography. If one stretches the definition a bit, I suppose YouTube vlogs can also be called visual diaries.

Many famous artists’ sketchbooks can be considered visual diaries, since famous artists tend to become famous because they draw very frequently, analyzing and reflecting on those drawings in their journals. They had to use some way or some place to record and study the world they saw around them and the things they thought about it. So, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Khalo, and all those artists’ sketchbooks I analyzed at the beginning of this course can be considered visual diaries.

A very niche example would be Janice Lowry. Whose sketchbooks/journals have even been accepted by the Smithsonian itself for safekeeping. She uses similar mediums for her diary as many others. Drawing, collaging and painting. Putting in ephemera, photographs, cut-outs, and her own thoughts to form her own visual memoir.

I chose ten of the diaries I thought were most interesting from list given in the OCA book.

Lynda teaches on how to keep a visual diary and the importance of cultivating an observant spirit and good habits. The art is simple (cartoonish) both in subject and in style, but it’s very packed. Most of it is on lined paper and in comic form. There is still collage and some painting involved. There is also a lot of text and plenty of color. Materials seem to consist of simple things like colored pencils, markers and white gel pens. The journals record daily happenings, thoughts and feelings written in easily readable script. These are all surrounded by little cartoons that can be related to what she wrote, but do not have to be. They are the journals of a cartoonist and they communicate a playfulness that I do not really apply in my own sketchbooks.

Margaret’s art is very simple. She either uses watercolors or pen, and she keeps the style very minimalistic and a little wonky. Margaret Huber mostly uses her diary to record her state of mind, rather than the world around her. The characters are simple, but they are not like the clean, crisp cartoons of Lynda Barry, and are not meant to be. The drawings look a little childlike and are not meant to necessarily be beautiful, they are meant to convey the message of her state of mind. She uses tight scribbles or overlapping text to convey a state of being overwhelmed or characters with odd positions to convey discomfort.

Rachel records the world around her, rather than what she thinks or feels. It is all in pencil and it manages to both be loose and clean at the same time. The characters and buildings are simple and blocky. I especially love the balance of the pencil textures with completely white space and crisp lines. It creates a wonderful sense of atmosphere and a little melancholy in her sketches. She is a reportage artist, and this is evident in the way she builds the environment enough for it to be important and to give a mood to the drawings, and also in the simple characters which have to be drawn quickly when out in the world, but also have to express a clear action.

Oliver Jeffers’ sketchbook is perhaps one of the most visually appealing to me. There’s an excellent balance of both collage (though things aren’t overly layered) and drawings. The collaged papers are carefully chosen and fit into the design of the spreads. They are never just there by themselves, he always incorporates them somehow in the concept of the page. I also like the aesthetic that he chose, and the color palette. It’s very calming. Stylistically, it’s kind of different from one page to the next, but somehow they all fit. I confess I am not sure how that is.

Dietrich uses a thick-lined or pen-lined approach. He mostly depicts very abstract drawings of faces, people and places. The style if full of bold colors with bold lines and a lot of experimentation with texture. Sometimes the page is entirely filled just patterns or shapes, other times the entire page has a pen drawing consisting of just a few lines. He chooses to write very little or not at all. It all looks very free and experimental. This is something I could apply more to my own sketchbooks. I do not use sketchbooks enough to experiment with mark making or just odd shapes.

Adebanji has a lot of sketches of people on public transport. Mostly in pencil or grey markers. The images are supplemented with a little bit of text. The drawings lean towards a more realistic style than everything I have analyzed above, and the handwriting scribbled around the drawing is very pretty, creating visually appealing spread. I used to not write in my sketchbooks at all, but ever since I have started this course, and analyzed sketchbooks of other artists, I have seen this a lot, and have started to apply it. I have liked writing my thoughts down, writing helps me process in a different way than drawing does.

Grechanik’s style is very bright, colorful and loose. She draws scenes with people and does not put in much text in reflection, just in naming on some illustrations. There are a lot of colorful lines, layered transparent blobs of color and spontaneous shapes. She depicts the everyday as a reportage artist, focusing a lot on people rather than environment. Her characters, while not proportional, look real because it feels like she catches on the essence of a person rather what they literally look like. She mostly uses watercolors, watercolor pencils and some ink.

JooHee’s style is very clean and comic book like. She uses marker and liner pen and depicts scenes of places and people she sees when she travels. She uses a lot of patterns in her work ( all drawing not collage). There is some color in her sketches but she mostly uses black and white, in contrast to her other work, which is very colorful. I love the way she plays with proportions. She blows up her main character until it is unrealistically large, but she balances the textures and the shapes of the compositions in such a way that it all looks good.

Nicky is interesting in comparison with the others, because her entries are probably the most journal-like. Or what I would imagine an artists’ actual journal about their life rather their work would look like. She creates an illustration for each day, encases it in a panel and writes a sentence or two at the top of the illustration. She mostly uses watercolor and ink. It’s a very pretty sort of book. More about recording the day than about recording ideas or content to use later. All I can say is that it’s very illustrative and not abstract. The art is simple and a little naïve in a way that I would describe as old-fashioned. There’s a sense of nostalgia when looking through her sketches.

Pascal Campion’s sketches are digital, which is why I wanted to add him to this list. He made a Sketch of the day goal and kept to it, creating a diary of sketches of both scenes from his imagination and from real life. His sketches are whimsical and textured in a way that only a digital sketch can be, because it is so easy to cover a large surface area in one go. He can afford to create a sense of atmosphere with interesting lighting and a more elaborate composition that looks balanced because of the digital medium. (When drawing digitally, it is easy to simply adjust a sketch without needing to erase everything, or simply leave it looking off).

I’m still learning to make a habit of sketching digitally, but ever since I started doing it, I have felt much more comfortable with the digital medium.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Get Out

The few times I have tried sequential storytelling the results were pretty embarrassing, but this reverse-engineering exercise sounds like it would make things less daunting.

Brandon takes clips from famous films, or films with good visual choices, and deconstructs the way the shots were planned out by sketching out thumbnails of the scenes. As far as I can discern from his process, first he selects a film and watches the scene, noting the important stages, then he sketches out a few similarly sized rectangles on his page. I assume he pauses the movie in key points in the narrative to sketch the most visually or narratively relevant stills. The sketches themselves range from pretty detailed (the Up sketches where you can see facial expressions and patterns) to very abstract (the Hitchcock film sketches, where the focus is mainly on composition and lighting). In one Get Out analysis he also uses color, but that is the only time he does so, the rest of the sketches are all in black and white in order to keep the focus of the exercise on composition. The reason he uses color in Get Out is that the color is especially important to the indirect storytelling. I will make sure to pay attention to that. But weather they are more or less detailed, the purpose of the sketches is still to understand composition and analyze unique way to tell a story.

He uses both traditional (sketchbook and soft pencil) and digital mediums to storyboard.

In his analysis of the Get Out panels he explains the way the images add to the narrative indirectly or subconsciously, and he dissects the way the characters are framed and lit, the special effects (such as the underwater effect in order to show that a particular scene happens in the past), and most importantly how all of these tell the story and add to it.

This short film analysis reminds me of some YouTube film critics I have watched such as Every Frame a Painting, Sideways and Captain Midnight. I might watch and analyze some of their videos before starting out on my own drawing exercise in order to create an idea of what to look for.

Up

Hitchcock film

Kurosawa film

I am not unfamiliar with story structures, since I have written stories before, though I have never seen the structure presented in the book, or the example with the cat. The different take was interesting though. Here is an image of my equating the steps of Campbells’ Hero’s Journey with which I am familiar, with the steps given in the book: