Hi, I‘m Lorena and welcome to The Stress Less Pencil. Together, we create art to make us feel good, not to make it look good. All weekly prompts are designed for total beginners and experienced artists alike, so come join us.
Memories are slippery bastards. Since I’ve started documenting my daily highlights, whether through daily doodles or gratitude journalling, I’ve realised just how quickly they fade. If you ask me on Saturday what I did on Monday, my memory is already blurry.
Learning to really savour our memories - the small and the big stuff - can help us improve our wellbeing. So it’s really important to document what we’ve experienced in a way that lets our future self travel back to that moment.
Keeping an old school diary is a classic way to do this, but it’s very time consuming. Finding the time to write each day isn’t always easy. It also takes time to go back through and read a bit to bring back the memories.
So today, we’ll try a new way of keeping a quick visual diary, inspired by my childhood game heroes, Super Mario, Alex Kidd, and Wonder Boy in Monster Land.
The Activity: Keep a 2D Diary
Step 1 - Draw the Line
If you already keep a journal or diary, you can add this your existing practice. To all you stationery addicts, please consider this your official excuse to go out and get yourself a new notebook. Dot-Grid would be perfect. Otherwise, a simple piece of paper always does the trick.
At the end of the day, draw a line across the paper from left to right.
Step 2 - Walk through the day
Starting on the left, use simple shapes, icons and stick figures to draw what happened in your day. Think about the main events, and some highlights that stood out. These can be the big things you did, for example a little computer symbol for noting that you went to work, but also the small things, like a cup to remember how you enjoyed the smell of your coffee this morning. You can go roughly along the timeline, morning on the left, midday around the middle, ending with the evening on the right. Or you can expand the times that were more significant.
Remember to keep it easy, you’re not going to make a realistic drawing of a full dinner scene at this scale. It only matters that you remember what you meant. And that your drawings allow you to travel back to this day when you look at it in the future.
My Example
I’m visiting my parents in Germany this weekend. So there has been a day of traveling, followed by two days of meeting family and friends, sitting together, and eating tons and tons of food.
Have a great week, friends! See you for the next level.
Love, Lorena