indoor adventures: art journaling

It's Valentine's Day and our feeds are filling up with hearts and gratitude. We want to keep a reminder of life and love as a permanent record - but how to make it special? With our first love - drawing!

Keeping a record of journeys, interesting objects, and events in our lives helps us remember them better. Drawing is one of the best ways of retaining a memory.

But that's not the only reason we draw. We process our thoughts and tap into our subconscious when drawing, coming up with unexpected images.

We turn shapes into things by drawing. We follow tones and values, the reflection of light off water, letting go of what our subject 'should' look like. And when we're done we have, instead of blue stains and scribbles and marks, a glassy wave.

We track the seasons by drawing our favourite flowers as they're blooming, by sitting in the park and capturing how our favourite trees look this year.

We discover shades of blue and violet in a pink flower, brown and yellow in green stems.

When we miss home we draw the little creatures we would see in our gardens. With the colours of tropical feathers and leaves we remember the feel of the sunshine, the smell of the carabao grass.

We learn scripts by 'drawing' them, turning alphabets from art to language.

We rediscover the smallest details about our neighbourhoods, finding beauty in fire escapes and telephone poles.

Words and pictures are the best combination, our right and left brains running parallel. Their strengths feed each other and look beautiful too!

And what's better than sharing this with each other? We share drawing tools and letters, techniques and encouragement. Combining memories.

All this builds space for future memories. We create ways to create. We draw to draw more, and anticipate future adventures. Happy drawing!