a tale of many journals...

After the past two or three years of journaling I have struggled to figure out the "best" way for me to do this. I've tried giant composition books with both words and visual journaling, but they get so bulky to carry around. I've tried just using a visual journal in something like a 5x7 spiral bound sketchbook, but have found that I wanted to do more journaling with words than that allowed for.

Then a couple months ago I started using my daily planner (really just a blank book with lined pages where I have all the hours of the day marked off for appointments and the like). The first blank book was a bit too big as it spanned a couple months and got hard to carry around. So this month I had a cheap $1.00 journal from the grocery store laying around so I grabbed it for my monthly appointment book. But I started jotting down stuff ... random notes, movies watched, what I had for lunch, grocery lists... all the stuff that flows through a daily diary/planner/journal... and I started using it to spark pages in my art journal -- which is mostly pictures. There is room in the little everyday journal for the occasional visual page, but mostly what ends up there becomes fodder for future pages. And because this is a spiral bound journal it is not precious and all kinds of stuff gets jotted down over the course of a day.

An example:

Here is a page from my daily book in which I noted one word "blustery" after going out at lunch.



Later that night I couldn't get the word blustery out of my head, and when I was playing with my art journal, this page appeared...



The best of both worlds, for now anyway...I don't know that there is a "perfect" way to journal, but this is working for me.