Creative journaling is a means of keeping a diary in a creative way. You can also make it more personal with photos, drawings and/or hand-lettering. Graphic designer Mirjam de Boer shows us how it’s easily done.
It doesn’t have to be beautiful
Sometimes it can feel a bit daunting to start a diary like this, especially if you don’t think of yourself as someone who is creative. There you are, looking down on your beautiful new notebook, ready to make a start on your creative journaling, only to find yourself ‘ruining’ the first page straight away, and then never wanting to pick the book up again. What a waste! And how wrong!! Mirjam, who gives workshops and courses on, among others, hand-lettering and creative journaling in the Netherlands, gives us some useful tips:
- Choose a small and thin notebook. It’s easy to carry around with you all the time and its size is a motivator because it fills up quickly.
- It doesn’t have to be all beautiful. If you look back on what you have made after a year, you will be delighted by the memories, and you’ll no longer notice that wonky line or ink stain.
- Give yourself a maximum of ten minutes per page. If you spend more time on it, you will start fixating on the details.
- Challenge yourself by working with different materials. This way you learn to have more fun in the creation process, and you think less about the end result.
- Don’t think too big. Draw or describe the details that matter to you. If you want to describe your breakfast, don’t draw the entire breakfast table; just draw the box of cereal. If you’re journaling your commute to work, draw the cover of the book that you read on the way instead of the entire train.
- Finally: You’re doing this for yourself and nobody needs to see it. If you are truly not so happy with a page, you can simply turn it over and, just like that, it’s ‘gone’.
