First, decide what kind of journal and format you want—a traditional rectangular landscape or portrait format, a square or an elongated rectangle for wide vistas. (I find the latter slightly harder to work on—the extra length seems to get in my way.) Choose the kind of paper you want for drawing in graphite, ink, colored pencil or painting. Strathmore’s spiral-bound watercolor journal offers a choice—their excellent watercolor paper is interspersed with lightweight drawing paper, which lets you sketch, paint and take notes, all in one place.
Canson and American Journey also offer nice, hardcover watercolor journals, as do several other companies. Look around, experiment and find the perfect choice for you. And, of course, you can always make your own. Bind them with the aid of a good instructional book like Dover’s Hand Bookbinding: A Manual of Instruction by Aldren A. Watson. That way, you’ll have the paper you prefer working on in the size you want.
If that seems too time consuming, consider cutting your favorite paper (I prefer Fabriano Artistico, myself) to size, and take the stack to a copy shop. They’ll spiral bind it with a sturdy cover quickly and at a reasonable cost, and you can even alternate watercolor paper, drawing paper and toned paper, if you like.
You’ll also want a good watercolor field kit. A lightweight container for water or a selection of watercolor brushes; a mechanical pencil; a gray, black or indigo wax-based colored pencil and a set of watercolor pencils should be sufficient for keeping an artist’s journal.
What you start with depends on how wide a focus you plan for your journal. Will it encompass your whole life? Will it be a “themed” journal, with a monthly or yearly theme? Will it be a nature journal or a travel journal? I prefer mine to contain everything under one cover—whatever’s going on in my life. However, I began first with a sketchbook dedicated just to art, and then moved to a nature journal. Another pad held notes and lists. Now all this is under one cover, and life is much more integrated!
A compact bag to carry all this in can go with you everywhere. Mine started out life simply as a dedicated field kit—I’d carry it in addition to my purse and whatever else I needed, whenever I went out of the house. I finally simplified things considerably and just put a credit card, driver’s license and checkbook into my field kit. Now it is my purse. You’ll find more detailed information on all of these important considerations in the materials section of chapter one.
Work across a two-page spread if you like, and create a montage of a single day. Just keep adding till you run out of room. Design the page, use a grid with small, quick sketches or allow your design to evolve naturally to fill as much space as it seems to need.
Here, the morning’s grocery shopping included a sketch of a sweet hound waiting for his master, an ink sketch of the woodchuck that frequents a den under my deck and a watercolor of my backyard jungle completed later in the day. I added color to the dog and woodchuck later.
This is in my hand-bound journal with hot-pressed watercolor paper.