I knew I had to take it home when I read this dedication:
Then, this week, I met someone who had also (co)wrote a book essentially dedicated to those same people (like me) and to helping them recognize their creativity and embrace it, set it free, play with it like a good friend. I watched him demonstrate techniques on using watercolor colored pencils to a group of students in a guest-artist workshop made possible by an excellent and hard-working middle-school art teacher. He also brought lots of his own visual journals for us to see and browse. The guest-artist was Eric Scott (on the right, below):
These are the authors of The Journal Junkies Workshop, which is an excellent beginner's guide to visual journaling.
I had actually misunderstood how to use the watercolor pencils (when I had tried to learn on my own), so Eric's demonstration was reinforced by technique instructions in the book:
The book's table of contents gives you the sense of fun they took into organizing the techniques and equipment suggestions:
I love the book and had an extra surprise in discovering a new direction of research and reading in the book's own dedication. This one is dedicated to Dan Eldon, a man who began his own first visual journal as a young boy in Africa and continued the practice throughout his life...right up until his death at age 22 while on a photojournalism investigation in Somalia. Intrigued? Indeed. Here's the site about his life and work, but also the titles of the books that sampled from his many journals: