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A Visual Diary, and the Slow Creation of Personal Lore
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 11:00:34 +0000 UTCHi everyone,
Luiza here. (・ω・)
For years now, I’ve been keeping a quiet, ongoing practice that’s become a core part of my creative life: a visual diary. These days, I use Pinterest to keep it simple, but the roots go way back. As a kid, I used to make collages and keep a scrapbook with pages filled with magazine clippings, fabric scraps, and handwritten fragments. It was a mixture of diary, commonplace book and sketchbook. I kept tabs on quotes of books I was reading, little bits of music, but mostly, on images that inspired me. It was my way of piecing together a world that felt like mine. This is just an evolution of that same instinct, carried into my adult life and my professional Art practice.
Since I found out about Pinterest, I quickly moved my Visual Diary practice into the digital space, so a lot of tactility was lost, but the simplicity of the app helps me think visually faster, and have more precision with what I choose to archive, to include videos, soundbites, and overall made the experience more dynamic.
These Pinterest boards aren’t just for collecting references or planning projects. They’re more like evolving moodboards that hold onto a feeling, a moment, a season of thought. A tone of being. They are my visual diary entries.
Each board begins when I feel a shift, subtle or sudden, in the imagery that resonates with me. It could happen in one afternoon or over the course of months, but when the current changes, I begin again, a new section inside the same board. And over time, this practice has turned into something much deeper than just curation.
It’s become a way of building my own personal lore.
Certain symbols appear again and again: animals, colours, shapes, and places. Not always intentionally, but persistently. And with time, they take on meaning. They become part of a myth I’m writing without words; a visual catalogue of the archetypes, themes, and emotional landscapes that live in me.
This diary isn’t linear. It’s a constellation. Looking back at past boards feels like reading old journal entries written in imagery instead of text. I can see how I’ve shifted, where I’ve returned, and what continues to pull me. It’s a quiet mythology in the making, and something I return to whenever I feel creatively disconnected. (｡•́︿•̀｡)
I pin those images on the boards without judgment, without thinking how they will resonate side by side, without understanding... and it's a great practice to look back and find them again once a new board is made. Sometimes the same images get recontextualised by the images that surround them, sometimes it's a completely new set of images. I have no rules when it comes to my visual diary. Some boards end up becoming very long, but I have also made a board with only 3 images on it.
I start and end boards when I see a shift in visual language or theme, or mood, but it's all intuitive. I allow myself to make no sense here.
Everytime I feel disconnected, or I feel a creative hiatus coming, those boards help me find myself back into my personal imagetic world, my personal visual lore.
There’s a lot of intuition involved in this process. I don’t always understand why an image pulls me in, it’s more of a quiet knowing, a sense of recognition. Something in it feels familiar, even if I can’t name it yet. I follow that pull without needing it to make immediate sense. Over time, the meaning often reveals itself. Trusting that instinct, allowing myself to be guided by feeling rather than logic, has become one of the most grounding parts of my creative practice.
☆～（ゝ。∂）
I wanted to share this with you, not just because it’s central to my process, but because some of you might find something in it that resonates. Maybe I inspire you to create your own visual diary, wether on Pinterest, on a personal blog, or on an old sketchbook you have.
( ´ ▿ ` )ノ
Love,
Luiza
Comments
Kinotherapy Movies
I guess I'm doing a diary thing but in video form. I just film snippets of my day and sometimes myself, although I try to keep it abstract.
Nuvolari
Thanks Luiza for sharing part of your intimate world! I always have some concerns when it comes to relying on digital platforms for collecting inspirations and creating visual diaries. I often wonder if and how the regular usage of the algorithms behind those apps influences the unconscious process that makes up our creativity (the fear of falling into a so called "feedback loop"). So far, my solution has been to mix online and offline elements in my diaries, always trying to keep the same openness and acceptance of lack of immediate logical sense to it. Are you also concerned about it? I'd love to know your opinion on this.
