December was sort of a blur, wasn’t it? For me, there was a lot of running around, battling colds, then the malaise of COVID. Entering January I feel like I’m coming out of a thick fog. It feels nice. I can visualize my thoughts again.
Last week I wrote about my word of the year: commit. And my first act of committing is to pay more attention — not just to my surroundings and the people around me — but also to myself.
To notice things, you have to slow down. You have to take a beat longer to observe and consider. I want to move away from the feeling of “getting through” each day and savor things — especially small ordinary things — food, interactions, and interesting things I see out in the world.
All this to say, I’ve decided to restart my visual journal. I filled up a sketchbook over the summer with a one-page-a-day approach to documenting things I ate, saw, and experienced. It started as an attempt to savor everything I consumed in a purposeful way and turned into much more. There’s something I really like about these raw, messy pages. It makes me feel like I’m writing the story of my life.
I take photos throughout the day to help me remember what I might want to capture on the page. Then I flip through my camera roll the next morning to jog my memory. I always start by drawing my first beverage of the day — usually coffee. I don’t sketch anything first or spend time planning. I prefer to focus on filling the page one line at a time. The purpose of these pages is not to create beautiful results. The purpose is to communicate — to capture a snapshot, however chaotic.
This is one of my favorite pages from last summer:
Thanks for reading
Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. Paid subscribers, please keep scrolling for a printable version of the “Slow Down” illustration shown above.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Art Oasis with Sheri Roloff to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.