For this exercise, I have found 10 different artists’ visual diaries. I have answered questions about the visual qualities and what context each image has. Each part is a small summary of what I think of every image.

Lydia Velarde

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Busy and detailed, with not a lot of empty space.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Everyday activities including small details e.g. 2-day migraine.

Lyndra Barry

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Busy with a lot of shading and texture.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Things that people have said as well as pages that look like editorial illustrations.

Lizzy Stewart

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Sparse, colourful, and very linear.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Quick sketches of bathers. Looks as though she has taken more time on the different page as the drawings are more detailed. Half the page is a written summary of ‘The National Gallery’.

Margaret Huber

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Messy and simplistic illustration.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Self-portrait and illustrated depiction of ‘burden carrying’.

Nicky Nargesian

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Fills the pages of the sketchbook with colour and illustrations. I like the fact that the borders of the pages have been neatly cropped with a fine liner and that the pages are numbered. Lovely use of colour.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Landscape illustrations are drawn using pre-markers (felt tip pens) and a fine liner pen.

Adebanji Alade

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Sophisticated life drawings. Skin and hair tone colouring.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – ‘On-location’ reportage illustration of random people and writing about specific people and what they are doing.

Marina Grechanik

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Mixture of watercolour, fine-liner and collage paper from the ‘Tate’ cafe.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – reportage drawing of a couple in the cafe of ‘ The Tate’ with background of ‘The Tate Gallery’ in the background

Oliver Jeffers

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Line drawing with fine liner or pencil. Small use of coloured pens or pencils used for map lines and rivers.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Simple map/location line with drawings of points of interest he saw en route.

Pep Carrio

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Graphic / linear drawings. Fills up completely or almost completely pages in a sketchbook. No use of colour just uses fine liner pen for all mark-making.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Human figures and lines. The picture on the left shows a human figure with what looks like a speech bubble leading onto the opposite page.

Rose Blake

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – Very good use of colour and texture. Use of fine liner and pre-marker type pens. Good use of tone.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – Minimalist/simplistic cartoon-like figures. People, food, objects and animals are depicted. Mostly abstract in design.

Laurent Moreau

• What are the visual qualities of the journals? – There is a great use of colour. The textures in these images are varied and because of this make the images more interesting and give them more depth.
• What kind of content and ideas are explored? – On the left, you have a number of people walking around in a woodland/park scene and on the right, you have a man lying down in the rain with an umbrella. Both images are very graphic in design.