Another quarter of a year gone means another collection of JIYU Monthly calendar drawings. Here’s January-April, plus a few things I’ve been using the free pages in the back for.
January:
What a rough month January was. By far the most fun thing about this spread was documenting snippets of my partner and I’s adventures in the video game we were playing together on our free evenings (Baldur’s Gate III, lol). You can see these in the squares for 4, 9, 12, 15, 19, 20, 24, 27 and 30.
February:
Yes, the darker ink on the other side of these pages bled through the paper. In the past this might have bothered me more, but after doing calendar drawings for all these years my priorities have changed: the memory keeping and practice of it is much more important than the public-facing aesthetic. I can tell what I meant when I drew in the squares—that’s good enough for me. Besides, I like to pick different, contrasting colors for successive months, and I didn’t want to corner myself into drawing with a light color for another five weeks.
March:
I suppose calling these calendar drawings “daily” is a bit of a misnomer. Honestly, I’ve been filling them in maybe every two weeks. Fully half of these doodles from March were done while sitting at the analog table at BK on their Eagle Rock location’s opening day. Maybe some of you saw me doing it there? Haha. The benefit of filling these in all at once is that there’s a bit more consistency and detail in the drawings. The drawback is that they reflect maybe a tiny bit less of my lived emotional reality on that specific day. But we go on!
April:
That’s the last of the filled-in calendar pages, but I thought I’d also share some of the things I’ve put in the free pages in the back of the JIYU Monthly so far this year.
Notes from the Jen Herzig Smith artist talk and show at BK:
Field drawings and notes from a local mushroom foraging hike:
Notes for a meeting (yellow) and stream-of-consciousness journaling (purple) that I did while I was traveling and didn’t have access to my regular mind dump notebook. These were written months apart, I layered them together here mainly to save space. I’ve been experimenting with cross-writing like this elsewhere as well—more on that in a different post, perhaps.
And last, tarot card pulls I wanted to remember:
That’s all for now! The next chunk of calendar drawings will cover May-August. I don’t expect my system to change in any dramatic way before then—it’s been a long time since it has—but there’s something fun about watching the little tweaks and surprises happen slowly over time, isn’t there? We’ll see what the summer months have in store.
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Text and photos by: A.C. Esguerra
Where to find A.C. : IG @blueludebar
Read other stories by A.C. : Here
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