5-Minute Creativity: Sketch Your Day in Watercolor and Pen

1. Sketch the Roadmap of Your Day: The next layout we're going to do, I'm calling it a road map layout, which is really just starting in one corner and working your way up and down, and up and down, or around in a circle, however you choose, just recording bits and pieces of your day from morning up until bed time. It's a go-to for me. I really enjoy making these pages, people really respond to them well. These little drawings can consist of stick figures. They can just be gestural. These drawings for me, I barely even have to sketch them, they're just little cute, representations of the stages of my day. For this page that we're going to finish together, I'm going to finish on camera, I've already sketched the whole thing out, and this is usually how I create these pages. Sometimes I'll just throw my sketchbook and a pencil and an eraser in my bag and that's it, because I just don't want to have a lot of stuff with me, and so that's what I did. On October 4th, I carried my book around and I did one of these busy day pages. So I'm going to lead you through inking it, we'll go through how I fill in spaces that I might not have filled in already with the pencil. Again, it's a loose guide for me. I have it pretty exact in this sketch just because I was going to let a few days pass before finishing it. But then I'm going to add at the end just a little bit of paint just to have things pop, maybe give some depth to some of the objects. Similarly to last time, I'm going to start in the corner, in the upper left corner and work my way down. I might even go back up to the top and work my way down. If I'm working on this quickly, I don't want to have my hand running over areas where I recently inked to avoid smudges. What I like about this layout is that I can work on it sporadically throughout the day. I can start in the corner in the morning when I'm having my morning coffee, put my sketchbook away in my bag, come back to it mid day maybe when I'm having a snack. A lot of times on really busy days that just seep into the week and then the month and into the year, you don't even know really what happened, what was accomplished, and I find it's really gratifying for me to capture those days on paper so that I can say, I spent two hours at the computer, I met with somebody at this time, I helped my son with his homework, what we had for dinner and then I'm in bed. I think it's really nice on these very busy days to have a record and see at the end of the day how much you accomplished. I just finished the ink, and keep in mind that this is something that you can easily do without sketching in pencil first, you can just have your pen and your sketchbook out and you can just doodle along as you go throughout the day. This would also work if you just wanted to do just a few little glimpses of your day, little sections of your day, especially if you have a vertical size sketchbook. You can just start at the beginning of the day, capture the morning essence through little drawings, the middle of the day and then nighttime. Again, it's not an exact science, it's just something that I enjoy doing and people seem to respond well to, and I find it's really enjoyable taking my sketchbook around as I go throughout the day. Now I'm going to add some paint, but I don't really use a lot of pain on these pages. I just use enough to add some little pops of color. I like to always color in my arrows, giving your eye a place to go from step to step to step, and then just little bits to give the object some depth and some shadow. Normally I would go back in and with my pen and really correct any little mistakes and highlight certain words, make certain parts of the letters thicker and thinner so that they stand out more. I think if you know my work and you've seen these finished pages, they are a little bit more refined and that's usually because I go back in with the pen. Today I'm not going to do that just for interest of time. But as you can see, I really just made the arrows stand out the most because I want to capture this road map idea. The drawings are really just little doodles. They're not really defined, they're not exact. They're just little fun representations of the little things I did during the day. When you create something out of just this normally fleeting, crazy busy day that just blends into the week, it just makes it special, and it celebrates it. It celebrates those two hours you spent at the computer. The little bit of math homework that your son had that you made sure he did. There's just something special about capturing those memories as a whole. Specifically, do you really care that you spent two hours at the computer? No. But as a part of a whole day, it brings it a whole new life and meaning. For the last layout, we're going to start playing with collage.