After taking a lengthy break from my journal to avoid burning out on it I’m back to painting in my brand new B5 sized journal! The brown and vintage look of my yearly pages inspired me to continue the brown aesthetic with a coffee theme for February.

I love a good cup of coffee. I start every day with drinking exactly one mug of it, without exception. I’m quite sensitive to caffeine, so if I were to get myself used to a higher daily intake I’d have to deal with headaches during days that I don’t get to drink as much.

For this month’s physical goals of my health triangle I wanted to invest in the healthy habit of ensuring that my body is well rested. The book I was reading wasn’t doing it for me, so I actually kind of screwed myself over for the month’s mental goal by switching to a different book a few days into the month, but I do intend to finish it anyway. I’m trying to build a relationship with some family members so I decided to include that in my goals for the social category.

I’m quite pleased with my paintings this month. While working on this cup I really enjoyed playing with shadows and light, trying to achieve a somewhat realistic look. It’ll be a joy using this month’s exercise page, aside from one minor whoopsie it came out really nicely!

This mood tracker was the first section I created and it was a lesson in what the limits of this journal’s paper are. Turns out that while it holds the watercolour paint used for the illustration here reasonably well, using actual coffee to paint the large circles and stains with was a Bad Idea as it bleeds through to the other side, a lot. I ended up glueing the pages to either side of this section together to hide my mistake. Thankfully I hadn’t drawn anything on the other pages yet that couldn’t easily be replaced.

I don’t particularly love that February has 29 days this year. Odd numbers aren’t the easiest to create trackers with and this is a particularly awkward amount, as it’s a prime number that isn’t divisible by anything but itself. I think I found a good solution for it on my habits page though.

Despite being só careful to start the word ‘cognition’ close to the left edge of the banner, it still didn’t quite fit, whoops! I enjoyed painting the cup of coffee a lot. It’s so much easier than I thought to get the foam looking foamy and it was a lot of fun mixing paints together to get a rich delicious looking brown or just the right shade of grey.

I miscounted the amount of circles for the first week and promptly decided to use a single one for the whole weekend, instead of one per day. I may actually stick with that, depending on how much I like summarising my whole weekend in one note.

All in all I’m very pleased with how this theme turned out. I had fun painting the illustrations, learned a lot and it genuinely was a joy seeing them every day!