Reflective Visual Journal

Your RVJ, critical journal, notebook, scrapbook whatever you call it is an indispensable tool for all visual creatives.  It is a portable laboratory for all your creative thinking and development, it is a place where you can safely nurture and evolve your ideas, it is your primary tool for engaging with visual practice.

“I begin with an idea then it becomes something else” 

Pablo Picasso

Working by hand in your RVJ is vital.  Drawing and creative thinking are the same thing.  It is a way for you to create a connection between your hand and your imagination.  It is a way for you to get your ideas out of your head and onto paper so that they can fully develop.  Most people carry a negative self-consciousness when it comes to drawing, afraid of other peoples criticism of our work, but drawing in your RVJ allows you to draw and doodle freely without feeling like you have to create a master piece to satisfy other people.  This removes the barrier that limits your exploratory mark making.  Drawing in your RVJ is the best way to problem solve, Leonardo Da Vinci developed a lot of his ideas by ‘thinking on a page’, and he use images to best describe his work.

You can almost see his mind at work when you look at his designs, you can see his train of thought, this means he is able to analysis his work and fully develop his ideas.

Using an RVJ also helps you utilise your creative brain.  In your head your brain is essentially split into two separate parts, and they carry out different processes and functions, you can improve your creativity by utilising these functions and your RVJ helps achieve this.  The right side of your brain is like a child, experimental, playful and curious and the left side is the opposite, organising, editing and classifying.  It is positive to approach your creative work consciously aware of which brain mode you are using.  With your right side playing and the left side evaluating you are sub-consciously switching between the two when in a creative process.

Play/Evaluate

Speculate/Interrogate

Experiment/question

Right..Left..Right..Left.. Right..Left..Right..Left.. Right..Left..Right..Left

Using your RVJ you are able to easily utilise your right side to maximise your creative potential and then analysis your work after with the left side to establish links in your work.     It also allows you to almost ‘play to a theme’ to get the most out of your work without it becoming random doodling, it allows you to explore in a direction. 

Here are good examples of the different types of work you produce with the different sides of your brain.  The Left side is very ordered and organised with large amounts of text explaining what is happening.  The right side creates very creative and open work that does not really have any purpose or direction until your left side takes back over. 

By utilising your brain and controlling the mode that you are in you can greatly improve the quality and quantity of the work that you produce and capitalize on your creative potential.