My dining room is also my studio for drawing and painting. This week, it was a mess of paint tubes, brushes, paint-splotched rags and old cottage cheese containers filled with water. Happily, there is basket, which tucks into a nearby shelving unit, to hide these supplies when I want to serve dinner to friends.

To develop and maintain artistic skills, you need to practice them. This gets easier when you have the equipment at hand and a designated place to play with it.

A wannabe artist also needs a way to explore artistic ideas and save them for future reference; an artist’s journal is a great tool for this.

Cathy Johnson shows how to create one with her new book Artist’s Journal Workshop: creating your life in words and pictures. She starts by exploring the why of journal keeping which she believes is the important first step to kick start the process.

She provides information about choosing art supplies and a journal with paper that will support a variety of media. She offers tips about designing the page and overcoming the terror of a blank one.

As well, she explores the different kinds of journal that one might choose to keep – daily journals, travel journals, memory journals and many more. A chapter on the journaling lifestyle is aimed at helping the reader to integrate the journaling habit into everyday activities.

“Keep it up,” she advises. “The way to get closer to your goal of improving your art is to keep making art. You’ll see you’re on the right path when you look through your journals. “