Keeping Creative Visual Journals

This is a venue for me to express my ideas about journaling and the creative process that will culminate in a book, hopefully with the same title as this blog. I have been teaching workshops on journaling for over a decade at Asheville BookWorks in Asheville. This year I have begun teaching classes at my studio. One of my favorite classes I am currently teaching is Keeping Creative Visual Journals.  This class asks you to consider all the various ways a journal can serve to enhance your creative process. Would you like your journal or sketchbook to better serve and support your art? Ever have a creative block? Want to organize your creative ideas better? This class is for artists, writers, or anyone who wants to learn how to use a journal to support their creative process. Do you have any half filled or blank journals? Creative journals are repositories for things that inspire us, from phrases to images, and therefore places we can go to when seeking creative inspiration. They can take many shapes. Over the course of 6 evening sessions the class explores various types of journals and the different purposes they serve, as well as various approaches to keeping them. I talk about how to energize half filled journals, begun but aborted journals that I refer to as "2 Pagers." We discuss how journals allow one to stop and savor, to explore and to foster inner awareness of one's creative process and so much more. It is wonderful to watch my students explore and reconnect with their creativity