October 4 Morning Practice

Today I took the theme of “windows” and ran with it. Just let myself doodle, basically. An altogether quick morning page. Worked on varying line weights and values while still staying monochrome.

I’m coming to the end of this sketchbook and I’m wondering what I want to do going forward. I’ve been focusing on black and white ink because 1) I love the bold contrast of black and white and I love using ink pens, and 2) drawing with pens is probably the easiest way to make art (especially when traveling). But I find myself yearning for color and other mediums.

Lately, I’ve been admiring several other artists who create visual diaries—Amandaworks with her wild expressive and colorful mixed media daily pages, Kevin Mercer’ and Marc David Spengler’s shape-driven collage journals…collage is definitely calling me back. Jane Davies shared a collage artist this week, Ashley Mary, whose work I loved…and then also Michelle Allen has some visual journal pages in either/and ink and paint in her instagram feed call that me too. (I’m not bothering to provide links because as a digital journal on my own website I’m not expecting too many people to stumble here—but if you do, you can find the above artists on instagram or pinterest or a quick browser search.)

Not sure where I’m going next, creatively, but I do know that I want to continue doing morning pages and most likely I’ll switch up the media. I also have to make a decision about whether to bring this digital journal project out into the world on those other platforms. We’ll see.

It’s been all black and white drawing this month and I do like this group of morning