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Buenos Aires pocket sketchbook

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journal

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Sun-kissed journal pages

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All of my notebooks [ journals, commonplace notebooks, pocket notebooks, zibaldones, field notes etc -- whatever you may call them] since Jan 1st. The two at the bottom are handmade.

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drawing from life

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Felt like drawing some bugs today 🫰🏻

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first page rambles

(pen is a Kaweco Sport <m> nib with j herbin Perle Noire ink)

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Finally starting a new journal.

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Daily art - I’ve been doing these in bed again every morning! Waking up at 5am (my 3 year old son wakes up at 6) - I keep a basket of ripped up artwork next to my bed with a glue stick and sketchbook and create collages. I count this little art ritual as a meditation too and it definitely beats reaching for my phone! 🥰

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June bullet journal :)

as ever I am late and not 100% happy with this one but I hope you enjoy it anyway ❤️

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[2024 vs 2014]

Ever since I made that post about my archiving system, I’ve been thinking a lot about my notebooks and the way my understanding of them has changed throughout my life, especially for the last two or three years, so I’ve tried to put all my thoughts down in another post.

Let me preface all of this by saying I don't know who this post is for. I'm tempted to say it's just for me, but if it was… Well, I'd just write it in a notebook.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned multiple times on this blog, I’ve been keeping notebooks since I was a child. I started using them just for drawing, developed the habit of carrying one with me at all times, and ended up using them for absolutely everything. Whenever I needed to write, doodle, or scribble something, my book was there for me. I’ve never had a set structure: I simply use the next available page until there’s none left, and then I start a new notebook.

Although the basic mechanics of my notebooks have remained the same over the decades, my relationship to them has changed. At first, they were only tools: places I could keep my thoughts safe in, only to be used in the very short term and probably never touched again when I was done. They were an integral part of my life, but only in a practical sense.

A couple years ago, I moved out of the apartment I’d spent nearly a decade in. While preparing to leave, storing all my life in cardboard boxes, I realized I’d accumulated an insurmountable amount of loose pieces of paper. Concert tickets, magazine cutouts, napkin doodles, theater programs—most of which I had no place for and forced myself to throw away. It was right then and there that something clicked: everything not saved (written, drawn, glued, somehow kept) in a notebook would be lost forever.

The following summer, I ran away from the place I’d moved into, taking with me only as much as a couple of suitcases could carry. I packed a winter coat and all my notebooks, and never looked back. Everything not kept in a notebook was truly lost.

I’ve started looking at my notebooks as a life archive. They no longer serve only present me but also long-in-the-distant-future me. I number and date them as clearly as I can, have developed a system to find old entries more easily, and write stuff down in a way that will make sense in the long run (as opposed to your classic “I know what I mean”). My pages have never looked flawless and perfectly aesthetic, nor do I want them to, but now I decorate them to my heart’s content and have a great time doing it. All in all, and even though they’re still tools I use in my everyday life, I want my books to be nice places to stay in, be it right now or years down the line.

As I said in the beginning, I’m not sure what the purpose of this post is or where all these thoughts leave me. I just think it’s wonderful to have so many years of my life documented by myself, and the ability to look back on them is priceless. Sometimes a notebook is all I have, and that’s more than enough.

Thanks for reading. See you soon, probably, for more notebook posting.

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little birthday solo date <3

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Relics from a book fair in Beijing

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~3 months traveling in my wife’s home-country -> 100 journal pages