I found this class just as I had received a summer assignment from art school to keep a 50 page long illustrated journal, and it was so helpful!

Coming up with topics every day is pretty hard! I'm only allowed to draw from life, no photographic reference or imagination. This means that I did not quite plan all my spreads ahead of time, as I needed to decide on the spot whether to draw something, so I tried guessing at a layout for each page as I added more pages. Because of the shape of my sketchbook, full 2-page spreads would end up being huge panoramas, so I instead treated each page as a spread. I know this is slightly different from what was taught in class, but I did 10 layouts instead of 5 then (well 9 actually, since one of them ended up becoming a full spread page).

I'll need to keep this up for 36 more pages, so wish me luck! :)

I'll be posting some sketches from it on my IG @echo.ism ^_^

 

On the right page, I decided on the fly to slightly change the layout

 

Since I'm planning each page individually, I decided to use some pages in portrait orientation rather than landscape.

 

One of the requirements for the journal was to vary techniques. I tried adding Posca markers and color pencils, but still gravitate heavily towards watercolors and ink.

 

As I also happen to be finishing my dissertation, I could not afford to spend a lot of time planning the size and shape of my text. But I think that I'm slowly getting more used to estimating how much space it is going to take - except when I'm obviously missing the mark, like on the right page here XD

 

Unrelated to the class: I found out the hard way that I really should have cleaned my fountain pen before switching to a different color ink, even if the cartridges were from the same brand (I'd had issues with different brands before, but thought that was reasonable). For the page on the left my pen kept clogging every couple of minutes T_T...

 

Thank you for this wonderful class! ^_^