Sometimes people are all concerned that an art journal can’t adequately record memories or whatevs because you don’t write out every last thing. Having kept extensive written journals and somewhat extensive (I haven’t been doing it as long) art journals, I have found that I actually prefer art journaling to record my life.

Just to clear things up at the start, I am using “written journals” to mean the “I did this, I did that, I ate 3 boiled eggs” variety. More like “diaries” I suppose. Writing can obviously be very expressive and most of my pages are based around words anyway so I am not knocking writing at all.

Take this little octopus guy. I used to swim like every day back when I had a gym membership and the first lap was always really good. So that’s the reason for that. But, as I was swimming, I always found myself thinking about octopuses and I would kind of pretend to be one because I lead a rich inner life. Then I would think about how when I was a kid we would sometimes play “Dolphins” in the pool, which is a “game” that involves pretending to be a dolphin ie going underwater and making really high pitched squealing noises and seeing if your friends could hear (they never could).

Most of my pages are like that – they usually jog a memory or I remember how I felt when I was making it etc. This particular page is not emotionally charged but it’s a good example of a trigger – it reminds me of my gym days but also takes me way back into childhood as I keep following the chain.

I used to keep written journals and some of them have a great deal of detail because I, like a lot of people, was afraid of forgetting things and wanted to make sure it was preserved somewhere. Those journals are also kind of boring and I rarely go through them (as opposed to my AJs, which I flip through all the time). I think it’s because I’m not that person anymore and it’s kind of like reading fiction that doesn’t have any particular plot or likeable characters (because really, do you journal about it when somebody is not pissing you off? If so, you are a better man than I).

Something that I think is really cool and maybe particular to art journaling is that the pages keep changing as you change and you can continue to interact with them down the line. For example:

I’m no longer really that concerned with recording the particulars of my life – first of all it’s not that interesting, but also if I truly don’t remember it then reading about it later isn’t going to serve me; if I do remember it, all I need is a little trigger. To be honest I am surprised at how well art journaling has worked out for me – I was a little skeptical at first because I thought literally transcribing your life was the only way to keep track of it but it turns out there’s more than one way to do it (who’da thunk it?).