Visual Journaling: What is it and Why it’s Beneficial
While it may not sound appealing at first, journaling your daily experiences is a great way to get all the thoughts and emotions - both good and bad - out of your system. Especially amidst this time where many of us are still working from home or living the quarantine experience, having a tangent for your personal baggage is incredibly important.
Visual storytelling can act as an alternative for writing a journal, even though it may not seem that way at first. After all, the first thing that people associate a story told through pictures with a comic or picture book. Utilizing visuals to tell a story doesn’t always have to be applicable to professional work or to entertain an audience.It shouldn’t be the set standard of visual storytelling. Like the term infers, you’re using visuals to tell a story, though they don’t always have to be sewn together into a convoluted plot.
This is where you can apply journaling to visual storytelling. If you’re like me, I struggle with expressing myself through words, my perfectionist tendencies manifesting after writing a few on a crisp page. Drawing, in contrast, is fun and even therapeutic for me in certain instances. So, instead of writing entries in my journal, I started sketchnoting them. Every once in a while, I would doodle something small to represent my day, comics ranging from lengthy introspections to silly moments either by myself or with my friends and family.
I’m not the only one who is taking on this formula of taking my life experiences and drawing them out. Within the art community, many artists have utilized their talents to draw mundane, everyday comics about themselves and how they feel. Here is one for reference: https://twitter.com/victoriaying/status/1372049815127781379?s=20
Although you may think otherwise, stylistic appeal doesn’t have to be a priority when it comes to using visual storytelling for journaling purposes. Simply being able to express how you feel through pictures is more than enough, is it not?
