Throughout this first part of the year, we have been asked to keep a daily visual diary. We were told it could be of any theme. However, my theme is quite broad. I decided to dedicate my diary to creative exploration, practice with a variety of media, and the odd sudden impulsive idea.

I’ve set about creating my visual diary this way because I felt the need to overcome barriers in my creative mind including doubting the quality of the outcome and having a scarce amount of interesting ideas on hand when starting new briefs.

Since I’ve finished this diary, I now feel I’ve expanded my horizons with media and created the space in my mind for ideas to flow freely.

For a week in between the physical sketchbook, I tried my hand at getting more familiar with painting. I did a few reference images, some more abstract takes, and even followed a Bob Ross tutorial using an app called ibisPaint.

At one stage, I got really invested in creating caricatures from random squiggles. I’ve always struggled to create the elaborate proportions that are the key component of this art style so I found this really good practice.

I had a strange idea one day after thinking about my Halloween costume which was “How could you create a biologically accurate angel?” so I referenced some skeletal and muscular models of the human shoulders and created what I thought could be an effective human wing socket joint. However, you don’t find arthropodic mammals and birds in nature, possibly due to how this would restrict movement and how extra limbs would be an inefficient waste of the animal’s energy. So I then thought about how you could turn human arms into wings without hindering their dexterity and essentially recreated the harpy.

Over the course of about 4 days, I hopped onto my VR and decided to do 3D sketches of two of my D&D characters in Tiltbrush. I thought I’d include these as part of my visual diary because I felt I had acquired essential knowledge on illustrating in three dimensions through creating these which could help me if I ever chose to take on sculpting for a project. The top image is a drawing of a character called Aoelus “Granny” Batmingle, and the bottom image is an unnamed character that I was in the process of creating but later abandoned because the backstory just wasn’t working really.

There is a story behind this entry. I attend a psychic circle group each Monday and on one of these days, we decided to try a new form of divination involving paint. So we created these strange intuitive art pieces and gathered information from them. This one, for example, informs me of the importance of an event, seemingly to do with dowsing and the use of the mind’s eye. This was a really good creative exercise which I’ll probably have to follow up on at some point.

Not too much to say about these ones. just some ideas I had on each day like how high caffeine affects my ability to create art and if you can draw with chalk in a sketchbook. making a map of patterns was probably my favorite to make out of this selection.

This, except for the glitched out sims 4 character I drew, was the result of a collaborative art game I came up with called “Frankenstein”. Each artist has to draw one of the three sections of a body (The head, torso + arms, or legs) without showing their creations to the other players. We then combine the body parts and get eldritch monsters like the ones above. I also redrew them with a new pen I bought.

These are the rest of the images I created for this diary.