Illustrated Journal journey, so far.

2 May 2026

I have been trying to work on my illustrated journal since November last year. That's when I bought my little sketchbook and signed up for Danny Gregory's course.

I thought Danny's course would be perfect, but no. For the price of $99 you get to see some of his artwork as an inspiration and get 31 five-minutes videos explaining the prompts, and that's it (super expensive for what it is)! The prompts are like: draw a moment of your day, draw a conversation you had, draw a "collage" of five highlights of your day etc etc. I started out trying to do exactly that, to draw each day one of the prompts to the best of my (lack of) abilities. I gave up on day 16.

I was doing my best to incorporate sketches, to document my day in images, but I just didn't know HOW, so I ended up writing a lot. The problem with writing is, I tend to get very negative, very fast. If I am frustrated and try to write about it, it turns into a 3-page long attack on myself. I have been journaling for years and I know that writing is NOT helping me.

I believe that drawing is the right tool to help me transform this self-hate into something healthy and good for me. But now I have a different problem. If I am frustrated because of a trading mistake, how do I draw that?!¹

So I went on a tiny quest, looking for free tutorials to teach me some basics, without going too deep. Because let's be honest, I already have an immense amount of hobbies and things to do (photography, baking bread, gardening, dogs, sewing, learning piano, programming, trading, not to mention cooking twice a day and the house chores!). I'm not interested in taking years to learn realism or whatever. I'm not trying to become the next Leonardo. I just want to draw a bit better!

I went through Sketch Loose's free course, then bought the book Watercolors in Nature and started (slowly) working through that.

At the end of the free course, I didn't feel like investing in a full course about ink and wash. I like watercolors and urban sketching, and it's something I want to do more of, but it's still not getting me closer to the "illustrated journal of my life" vibe I'm looking for. I can't even describe what I'm looking for, but I knew it was not that.

At the end of January Astro died, and I really stopped using my sketchbook. I was very afraid of writing and falling into a dark hole. I didn't know how to illustrate my sadness. I'm good at photography², at least that's one thing I don't need to learn. I bought myself a Canon Selphy printer and started printing some of his recent photos, also printed some on the Instax Link Wide, and made a small memorial with his photos, his name tag, a couple toys.

Last month I discovered I could print 8 small photos in a single postcard sized print and thought "since I can't draw, at least I can stick photos on my journal"! I figured I could draw arrows and little doodles to make it more sketchbook-worthy. Then I got my huge box of crayola markers out to add some borders around the photos. Got the colored pencils and started revisiting some older drawings and adding more color to them. Suddenly, my stuff doesn't feel so cringe anymore, my ridiculous drawings actually look kind of cool.

I decided to see which of my favorite illustrators on instagram have books or a patreon. Guess what, Kate Sutton has a course on ILLUSTRATED JOURNALS on domestika! OMG! How did I not know that?!

Her work is wonderful, her style really resonates with me and it reminds me a lot of the woodcuts from my homeland.

Kate's course is really nice. Much longer than Danny's, and for a third of the price. On each video she presents a facet of illustrated journaling (a prompt of sorts) and then works on a sketchbook page, so we can see HOW she does it, her technique, her tools. Super inspiring, super helpful, super everything I wanted. I have already filled 75% of my sketchbook and even ordered the next one so I don't risk being out of pages, never again!

sketchbook, journaling