Visual Journaling – Dayna J Collins

New Year, New Journal

I have too many flippin’ journals all going at once, so what am I thinking starting another one. I am a sucker for journals. At the current time I am actively working in several. Follow me . . . .

Color Journal: A place to keep track of colors I like, the brands of colors because not all colors are the same, what happens when certain colors are mixed together, formulas of colors I like, and the Pantone color of the year (this year it is Very Peri).
A small painting journal where I have combined paintings with art quotes on the opposite page. This has been in process for the past couple of years.
A vintage book where I wipe off excess paint from my palette, clean off my brushes on the pages, glue in leftover tidbits, and experiment with quick ideas that pop into my head.
Visual Journal: This 9×12 inch journal is my hard-working jack of all trades journal. I take notes in it when I take a class, record ideas for a painting or a show, sketch out ideas, and take notes at art meetings. This is my official visual journal and has been a key part of my art practice for many years. The journals are lined up in my studio with little tags indicating the dates covered in each journal.
Collage Journal: An old composition book where a student kept notes and did engineering types of drawing, and also glued in tests and notes. I use this journal to create collage compositions right over the writing and drawings. The glued in papers I have torn out, but gluey residue peeks through on many of the pages.
Junk Journal: I created this big chunky book out of hundreds of pieces of old papers, collage materials, and ephemera, and created three signatures (or was it four? the journal is thick). The junk part was my use of junky papers, but then I have gone back in and embellished the pages, fleshing out more complete collage compositions. I have been working on this one for months!
Covid Journal: When Covid hit in full force in early 2020, I took one of the junk journals I had made and recorded milestones and statistics for the first full year of our lockdown. Every once in a while I will go back in make a note or update the statistics. Sadly, I am entering the third year of entries.
Travel Journal: Anytime we take a biggish trip, I maintain a travel journal. My most recent travel journal was done in September when we spent a couple of weeks in New York. I used a handmade artist journal and cut and glued paper and ephemera from our daily excursions.

Which brings me to January, 2022, and the decision to what I plan to do regarding a journal in the new year. In 2019 I committed to painting a painting a day in a 9×9 inch journal and somehow I pulled it off. Sometimes I was playing catch up, but for the most part keeping that painting journal got me into my studio. Every. Single.Day. (And it took seven journals to get through the year.)

A few of my favorite paintings from my 2019 journals:

In deciding what kind of journal would be most enjoyable, I flashed back to 2012 when I used “The Open Daybook,” a perpetual calendar book, edited by David P. Earle. I remember buying this big book of a journal at Monograph Bookwerks (fine art books, objects, + ephemera), located in NE Portland, and I was so excited to use it to record what I did every day for a year. Each page has original art by 365 artists (actually 371 as some worked in groups), so the imagery and graphics were always a treat.

A few of my pages from 2012. My entries were short and sweet, but really captured in detail how I spent my days.

That year of record keeping got me to thinking about what kind of journal I would keep now, ten years later. I keep a lot of visual journals (obviously, from the list above), and I have a calendar on my desk. But what if I kept my own sort of Daybook, a cross between what I did today, but coupled with a sprinkling of collage, dabs of paint, imagery, ideas, quotes, and what is on my mind (now there’s a scary thought). I liked the sound of this combination and I just happened to have the right journal for the job (cue the dramatic music), a chunky beast of a journal, built by Leather Village craftspeople.

I wrote a private preamble on New Year’s Eve, then jumped in on January 1st.

I am off and running.

Brooklyn Travel Journal

We spent the last two weeks of September in Brooklyn, New York, so of course I logged our trip with a Salvage Collage junk journal.

I didn’t make my own journal, but used one created by my friend Laurie at Black Dog Studio. It came with a nice variety of papers, including some heavy watercolor paper, so I was able to adhere all kinds of papers, post cards, street fliers, and whatever paper materials I could scrounge. It was a bit more challenging on this trip because during a pandemic, there isn’t as much print material as usual. But being the scrounger and junker that I am, I managed to cobble together a pretty interesting journal.

We rented a tiny Airbnb apartment in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. I set up my make do studio on a tiny desk in the corner of the tiny bedroom with a nice view of the fire escape and the Manhattan skyline in the distance.

I hunted and gathered each day, my piles of possible fodder growing and expanding, and I used the bed as a place to sort.

Every night after a day of exploring Brooklyn (or Manhattan), I returned to our apartment, where I cut and pasted the scraps I gathered during the day, into my journal. The journal began to take on a life of its own. I didn’t keep a chronological travelogue, or even write about our days. I just ripped, cut, and glued, creating a collaged journal with visual reminders of our first big trip in three years.

On our return trip, we turned a two hour layover in San Francisco into a three day layover (so I could see the Joan Mitchell exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). My travel journal just kept growing, setting up my studio on the desk in the corner of our hotel room.

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Final Pages

I did it! During 2019 I set a goal of painting in my visual journal every day. I sometimes fell behind if I was out of town, other times I took my paints and journal along with me and kept up. I fell waaaayyy behind in mid December and it took me until mid February to get completely caught up, but family medical emergencies are never convenient.

I filled 6-1/2 visual journals (I wrote about my process and the type of journals I used here) and created 366 pages of paintings (I accidentally painted two pages for the same day). Throughout the year I did blog posts sharing about my project and posting photos of my favorite pages; now I want to share some final photos of favorite pages created since my last post in early November.

It was a great year. Some of my takeaways:

I challenged myself to get into my studio every day.
I experimented with new ideas.
I pushed myself to use different colors and compositions.
I explored using a bigger vocabulary of marks and lines.
I challenged myself to be bold and at times audacious.
I had fun, which helped me paint loose.

Mission accomplished.

And now I’m doing something different for 2020. . . . . . .

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Selected Pages

I will soon complete journal #6 in my quest to do a daily painting in my visual journal throughout 2019. We’ve been revamping a house in Astoria on the Oregon coast, so I’m about ~~a week behind~~ two weeks behind in my daily paintings, and I plan to get caught up after Thanksgiving. Yesterday I cataloged the pages I have completed since early October, so I thought I would share some of my favorites.

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Recent Pages

Time for an update of my year long project of painting in a visual journal every day. Here’s a selection of pages from late summer through early fall. Favorites:

Themes continue to emerge: Play, experimentation, circles, layers, mark-making, revealing, excavation, color, lines . . . . and I’m in the final three months of my project.

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Mid Summer Paintings

200th Painting!
July 19, 2019
Dayna J. Collins

Daily painting is still happening in my studio (and sometimes when I’m on the road and not at home). One time I forgot to take my painting journal with me, so I painted on little pieces of watercolor paper I had available and then taped the pieces into my journal, a couple of make do entries (you’ll see them below). Here are some selected pages since my last post on May 28.

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Newest Pages

I started doing a daily painting in my visual journal on January 1st and believe it or not, I’ve stuck with it. I got a little behind over the past couple of weeks, but I’ve been slowly doubling down on my daily paintings and I’m almost caught up. I did my first post about this project on January 25 and then an update on March 27. In both of my previous posts, I shared a selection of daily paintings from my journals (I’m on journal number 3). I figured it was time I did another update and share more paintings. Going through the pages of my journals, I am reminded why I’m incorporating this practice into my daily schedule: 1) It gets me into the studio, and 2) I’m experimenting with composition, colors, and ideas. All very good things.

100th Painting!
April 10, 2019
Dayna J. Collins

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – New Pages

Studio cat at my visual journal painting table.

I last posted pages from my Visual Journal on January 25, 2019, and unbelievably, I have continued with my daily practice of painting every day, focusing on color, composition, and making random marks. I have found several benefits from this daily practice. 1) It gets me into my studio. Even though I sometimes think I’ll just pop in to paint a page, I often linger and work on other projects. 2) Because these daily pages aren’t precious or for anything other than fun and practice, I work looser and with more freedom than when I’m painting for a show or a deadline. 3) My practice pages have become inspiration for my paintings in oil and cold wax.

Wall of 12×12 inch oil and cold wax works in progress with photocopies of my journal pages above.

Here’s a smattering of my pages from the past couple of months:

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal

I decided to shake things up a bit when I hung my 2019 calendar, thinking I would paint a quick abstract each day in my visual journal. Who knows how long I will maintain this practice, but so far, so good, and today is January 25th.

I’ve learned a couple of things along the way. First, it is fun to paint quickly, loose, and free, for no reason other than the joy of painting. And second, as a result of painting quick, loose, and free, I have several ideas for bigger paintings!

My acrylic painting station in my studio. Photo taken the morning of January 25.

No need to share every daily painting, but here’s a random selection.

My journal is 9×9 inches, mixed media paper, and spiral bound so it lays flat when it is open. I’ve been using Golden acrylics, a black Stabilo pencil, sharp pointy objects for scritching and scratching, Stabilo Woody 3 in 1 Stabilo pencils, a paintbrush, occasional stamps and stencils, a No.2 pencil, and a palette knife.

Palette paper for the week ending January 25.

Tapestry of Resilience: A Visual Journal

We’re back from our six-week plus trip and my blank pages are now plump with found fodder, scrounged materials, a few photos, and lots of writing describing our adventures.

I posted on my personal (and public) Facebook page throughout our trip (Dayna Davidson Collins), so I’m not sharing about any of the trip. What I am sharing are some of the pages from my travel visual journal. In my last blog post, I shared that all of my pages (104 of them) had been pre-gessoed and painted, so all I took in the way of art supplies was a pair of scissors, a jar of matte gel medium, a paintbrush, a brayer, wax paper, and three gel pens – black, white, and red; all my supplies fit in a zip lock baggie.

The daily routine went something like this:

We set out for a day of exploring, hoping to easily find the Tourist Information office so I could gather brochures. Sometimes we weren’t near a TI, so the hunt was on for paper fodder. Art museums were good for brochures, and often their tickets were large and had beautiful art images on them, but there didn’t seem to be as much paper materials as there has been in the past. In a pinch, I bought a bookmark or a couple of post cards so I had images to incorporate onto my pages. Or I picked up bits and pieces of trash or pulled down chunks of posters.

At the end of the day and after dinner, I sat at my makeshift desk or on the bed and cut up images and words to use on my pages. I would make a list of everything we did and saw and began gluing things onto the pages; each day had a two-page spread. I glued, brayered, cleaned up the gluey edges, placed a piece of wax paper over the pages, and weighted them down with whatever was heavy and handy.

In the morning while sipping my cappuccino (which my sweet husband faithfully fetched), I removed the weights and wax paper, grabbed my gel pens, and referring to the list I made the previous day, wrote in and around the images I had glued, recounting what we had done and added details I thought were interesting.

Here are a few photos of me at various points of our trip, working on my pages.

Working at a table in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Sneak attack as I worked at my desk in our Berlin, Germany apartment.

The Pages. As I mentioned, my travel journal has 104 pages, so I’ll share a sampling of my two-page spreads, in no particular order.

When we got home, I had a few blank pages remaining, so I printed off some photos, inserted those on the last pages, then added my completed travel journal to a stack of pages from previous trips.