Sketchbooks and Journals

For the longest time I’ve been a digital artist and kept a digital journal but this year I started writing in a physical journal daily and I’ve been drawing in my sketchbooks again. It started with me stumbling across the Hobonichi subreddit last December and becoming enamored with the idea of keeping and decorating a journal so I bought two Hobonichi dupe off of AliExpress; a A5 planner and a weeks. I went with the Kinbor dupes because they’re cheaper and I didn’t want to drop a ton of money on journals I wasn’t sure I was going to use for the whole year. Instead I ended up falling into the Japanese stationary rabbit hole and spent the same amount of money anyways because I love writing in my little journal and drawing in my sketchbook with bougie mechanical pencils and pens. I even started writing with fountain pens because they don’t hurt my hands since I tend to grip my pens too tightly and I don’t have to do that with fountain pens.

So I’m using my Weekly planner as a glorified to-do list, habit tracker, and to keep track of the chores and tasks I did on a given day. I also keep track of my work schedule too but I mainly use my phone for that since this planner lives on my desk. My journal also lives on my desk and every morning I write the previous day’s entry since I know I’ll forget to do it the day of. The entries are mainly me just writing down what I did or how I felt about what happened that day. Very minimal/text only spreads, sometimes I’ll put stickers in the empty space under the entry after I’m done writing that match the vibe of the entry. I use a Uni Jetstream 3 (.7 mm) in my weeks and one of my fountain pens in my journal, either my Pilot Kakuno (M), Kaweco Perkeo (F), or my Lanbitou 3059 (TWSBI eco dupe, roughly a western F).

For my sketchbooks I actually have two: one is a A5 Midori notebook that lives on my desk and the other is my passport sized fauxdori that lives in my backpack. The paper in both is really nice and takes whatever medium I’ve thrown at them no problem (microns, mechanical pencils, and fountain pen ink). I’ll take pictures of them once I’ve used them longer. I’ve been pretty good at drawing in them daily but I tend to work on sketches longer than I’d like to so I’m so slow at filling them. I’m trying to break my perfectionist mindset so you’ll have to bear with me on this one. I do have some recent sketches from my last sketchbook:

I’m working on making my portraits more interesting by adding more details, these ones are before I started doing that. I also did a bunch of full body sketches and realized I don’t actually like doing those at least not traditionally. I like doing those digitally because it’s easier to check and fix proportions but that’s besides the point.

Also before I go I do have a little life update: still not feeling funky fresh but as you can see I’m still trying to keep doing what I love doing (indulging in my various hobbies and interests). I predict things will still be a little shaky for us until the end of March but after that we should be back on track and in a better headspace!