January 2026 Art Practice

I’m beginning each month by creating a cover spread in my sketchbook, scanning it as you see here and then posting it on the top of my website for the month. So any time you visit, you’ll see what I’m working on that month front and center.

Except to tell you the truth, I’m doing this for myself more than for anyone else. You’re welcome to check in here any time to and see what I’m creating, but I’ve decided what I’m doing here on my website, a personal website, is really mostly for me. I’ve come to see that a website can be a sort of creative diary, a tool to help me think about my art practice and document my creative life.

This cover spread is meant to solve for the challenge I have in my art practice is to stay focused! It is so easy to start doing one thing and then another and another, and suddenly I’ve forgotten all about my intention to finish what I started. So with my creative focus items front and center both in my sketchbook and on my home page every month, I should be able to stay focused on what I set out to do for the month—and save all those other ideas (which I do track in a notebook) for another month.

I also set aside the next spread after the cover for journaling about the month. On the left side, I write out my intentions and I’ll come back to the right side to review how the month went. Highlights, challenges, Insights and Lessons. I think it would be nice to look back at this year and see that I sustained certain practices that led to growth. We’ll see.

For January, as you see, I’m going to focus on four things:

Illustrated Journal

I have done illustrated journaling off and on for years now, but very inconsistently and I haven’t yet come up with a sustainable format. There are so many ways to illustrate one’s life and I have yet to find my way. This month I intend to find a process and a format that will sustain my going forward—and I’d really love to keep an exclusive sketchbook just for that purpose.

31 Days of Drawing

I want to draw something every day in January

Geomoetric and Organic Shapes project

I love shapes! But I really don’t understand this response I have to shapes. So I’m going to spend the month exploring shapes. My thought is to choose a shape or shape set and then iterate on cards different ways to create with just that shape/set, then reflect, and then choose a different shape or shape set to explore again, and so on. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have more insight about my relationship with shapes.

Inner Magic Art Club

Yet, I just signed up to this membership with Jessica Swift and Becky Hershey where two times a month the group gathers on zoom to create intuitively—which is my favorite way to create. AND I could definitely use more creative community in my life. Both Jessica and Becky are lovely, the music is greatr, and when I tried it out last month I fell into such creative flow! More please!

Okay - so that’s what I’m doing month by month

October 15 Morning Practice

Well, I did it. Working both mornings of 14 and 15th, I left black and white ink behind and filled two pages with illustrated journaling and lots of color (posca pens). I used Michelle Allen’s color block and lettering styles, and then continued with my own subject matter and style. I used to fill sketchbook pages like this now and then and it was fun to come back to it.

I started with an insight I’d had recently that underneath all the things I think I might want in my life, my real goals are pretty simple: make friends, feel peace and excitement and connection in al the good ways that all link together like chain.

I illustrated a quote from a book I finished recently, Meditation for Mortals by Oliver Birkman, that really stuck with me. If life is like being thrown into a big mysterious sea as the philosopher __ Heidegger proposes, Birkman rightly observes, we’d all like to feel as if we’re “captains of a super yacht.” in full control. But in fact we are just paddling around on our little kayaks. So much of life is actually not in our control. I liked that analogy a lot.

I captured my poor grandson’s ambivalence about halloween. Almost two years old, Archie is coming across all kinds of halloween decorations out in the world that scare him. The other day he was on my lap and we were reading a halloween book together when he turned the page to see a Frankenstein figure. He puzzled over it for a moment and then looked up at me with a worried expression on his face, “Not spooky?” What a good question!

And finally, feeling gratitude for several friends and still fighting my own lack of confidence in drawing comic people, I tried my hand at drawing them. Not my style, I think, but a good exercise.

I decided that I really don’t like using Posca pens to fill large blocks of color. I should have broken out the paint brushes with goauche. To draw it out first before paint, I’m thinking I could do something like this in rough colored pencil and then go over it with goauche and ink. That might be more fun to do—and I’ll have many more color choices too.

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