What Is a Visual Diary and How Can It Unlock Creativity?

Learn about this powerful yet personal tool to explore your ideas in a safe space

When you’re creating work for a client, a boss, or anyone else, your relationship with that work can be affected. Deadlines and endless loops of feedback can dull creativity and leave you feeling desperate to get back in touch with your unique style and motivation. But Pepita Sandwich and many prolific artists before her have a solution: a visual diary. The sketchbook you hold close to your heart and don’t show anyone else—unless you want to, of course!

In fact, Pepita (@pepitasandwich) has turned parts of her diaries into popular comics about millennial life, intersectional feminism, nostalgia, and mental health. The Argentinian visual artist and graphic novelist has published Diario de Supervivencia (Survival Diaries; 2016) and Las Mujeres Mueven Montañas (Women Move Mountains; 2018) in Latin America and Spain.

She works with brands such as Facebook and Cartoon Network, and creates visual essays for The Washington Post and The New Yorker. Here, she explains what a visual diary is, and how it unlocks her creativity so effectively, she created a Domestika course about it.

So, what is a visual diary?

Pepita explains that a visual diary is a sort of journal kept by artists, where they can freely explore interesting marks, ideas, techniques, and more. Generally, most of it will be kept private, as you want to feel untethered from any commitments and completely free to create whatever you want. Some of it may be a precursor to professional work, but the diary is a space just for you, to experiment and “explore your life and brain with line and color.”

The power of the page

It’s also a “form of therapy”, Pepita notes, where you are able to literally put your feelings “into the page” without any self-consciousness. It’s a space to be your whole self, however weird and wonderful.

One of the main ways it can help with the mental health aspect to being an artist is that it trains you to overcome overthinking. By drawing in a visual diary every day, you’re forcing yourself to confront the blank page head-on and make things happen. Try drawing something new every time, and you’ll quickly become less afraid of starting real-world projects.

How to use your visual diary

Pepita begins each day by drawing on three to five pages in her sketchbook. This opens up a creative flow and gets her in the mood for work. Then, as she moves around throughout the day she brings it wherever she goes. Whether it’s people-watching, animals, the food she eats, objects around her house—whatever is on her mind or inspires her, it goes in the diary. Pepita also draws when she cries, exploring her emotions openly.

Lastly, she recommends taking yourself on “drawing dates” where you dedicate time (at home or outside!) to working on your style and allowing your unique voice to emerge in your work. Too often, time for this exploration gets pushed aside.

Finding inspiration

Throughout her course, Pepita recommends a few places to look for inspiration when it comes to the media and techniques you might include in your diary…

Other artist’s sketchbooks

Two artists in particular have sketchbooks that Pepita refers back to again and again. First is Frida Kahlo, who in her sketchbooks recorded her feelings and what she wanted to paint and try out in her writing. Flipping through the pages you’ll find watercolor works and sketches, vivid in color, and chaotically busy, dense with her transformative process.

Secondly, there are the sketchbooks of Seymour Chwast, the graphic designer behind Push Pin studios alongside Milton Glaser and Ed Sorel. His sketchbooks feature more blank space, making his doodles stand out. The symbols and faces stacked across each page are bold, fun, and whimsical. Pepita notes the lack of proportion or perspective—it’s about expression, and drawing as a way of seeing the world.

Art books

Of course, many artists never share their sketchbooks, so access to them isn’t always possible. But, you can look at other art books—especially retrospectives and biographies—that demonstrate the transformative power of the creative process at work. Pepita recommends Matisse: Cut-Outs, which shows the work he created late in his career (and indeed his life). The organic shapes he created using only scissors and colorful paper are striking, highlighting the unexpected and producing very lively compositions.

Grapefruit, by Yoko Ono, looks almost like a book of experimental poetry, using regular words to craft creative prompts and conceptual art you can bounce off. The “instructions” rely on the reader’s imagination to carry out, and become involved in the artwork themselves.

Finally, Pepita discusses Syllabus and Making Comics by Lynda Barry. Her books cover overcoming fear, exploring empathy, breaking free from inhibitions, and expressing feelings. Using unexpected, everyday materials, and an untidy style can be very liberating. Looking at work like this and creating it yourself is a reminder that art doesn’t have to be a sacred, high-brow affair.

Your favorite media

Finally, you can simply look around you. Pepita cites vintage Disney animations as a huge influence on her work and thinking. So, what could your interests add to your diary? Whether it’s music, film, animation, or any other creative medium, your diary can become a well of inspiration, always there for you to dip back into when you’re feeling lost and disconnected.

Are you ready to record your thoughts and experiences in a way that develops your art style and process? Let Pepita guide you on the journey to drawing your life in her course, Creative Visual Diary: Learn to Draw Your Life. And we have other sketchbook courses too, covering a variety of styles and approaches you can take.

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