Dan Price

How to make a journal of your life by d.price is a little book and quick read, with a total page-count of 117 pages but every sheet is packed with drawings and handwritten text. It does what it sets out to do, in eight chapters it tells you how to write, draw, take photographs to print and stick in and other ways to provide a souvenir of your life in a notebook. Every time I open this book it makes me smile.


I bought this book to inspire me to restart my sketchbook habit that had been lying dormant for a while, and it has done just that. The illustrations contained within the book are simple and not too intimidating for the beginning artist when compared to their efforts. And the blind contour exercise of drawing without looking at the paper is a classic.

Daniel Price is the perfect person to write this book as he has followed this path and even published his journals for 7 years as the moonlight chronicles and he has included excerpts from these in the back. The author encourages the reader to slow down, and record the simple pleasures in life as he has done.

My favorite part of this book is the section where he asks people who he goes out for coffee with to draw the salt cellar and the reactions from his victims. I might have to try that myself.

The only thing I would change about this book was to make it longer, it was over far too soon but that is often the way with handwritten books.

I would recommend this book to anybody who wanted to start an illustrated journal or somebody like myself who already does but is feeling a little uninspired. It would be the perfect gift for any aspiring artist or writer, probably accompanied by a nice notebook.

Check out my new book blog Engrossed in a Good Book .… (altro)

This tiny book is written for adults but usable for young adults as well. Witty and informative the book gives lots of ideas for building up a personal collection of handmade journals. Price wants the end result to be a quirky and idiosyncratic book rather than a slick or polished item which shows nothing of one's own interests at the time. It’s a time capsule of sorts.
Price sees the value of journaling as self-discovery, which I have to agree upon as the true essence of someone doing this type of crafting or writing. When I first had to do journaling, it was as a high schooler for English class. The value at the time was to get us college prep students used to writing, any type of writing. I found it boring but actually useful for college. I never really knew how much time to spend detailing what I was supposed to be writing about. If I had known that beforehand, I would not have stressed over the whole ordeal as much as I did. The real value I discovered later on was as a tool for understanding the way and reason for my thinking and feelings. It was still a difficult habit to master but I saw the relative importance to people who can or prefer to communicate through written form. In the case of journaling, it usually became mixed media in form.
Some people nowadays do genealogy as a type of personal discovery. Some write memoirs, fiction or poetry. Journaling is actually easy, immediate and requires little time trying to devise imaginative and elaborate constructions.
An excellent and interesting book.… (altro)