TRACIE GUY-DECKER
Gratidoodles
Illustrated gratitude journaling
Gratidoodles or Illustrated Gratitude Journaling is a practice created by Tracie Guy-Decker beginning in the spring of 2022 and developed in the intervening years. The concept is simple: draw the things for which you’re grateful. The creativity is as much in figuring out how to render good weather or a challenging workout as it is in the actual drawing.
Loose, free movement is the hallmark of gratidoodles. They are not created to be Works Of Art (with capital letters), and so they do not need to be approached with Seriousness. Rather, gratidoodles are an opportunity to simultaneously tap into the power of gratitude and the magic of creativity. Each drawn object of gratitude also has some hand-written text to name it and offer some commentary on it. The text is an opportunity to further explain why I felt grateful for a given thing, or to capture a sensory memory not visible from the drawing.
Gratidoodle pages are meant to be created relatively quickly. If a mistake is made in the lettering, it is simply crossed out and replaced. Gratidoodles are the opposite of precious. They are raw, free.
As they pile up inside of a sketchbook, they become an illustrated record of your life. There is something deeply satisfying about reviewing old sketchbook pages to remember the small and large things that brought joy.