Craft curator Allison Mitola

This easy to draw ocean scene is a great way to track your mood and can be easily added into any journal or paper you have around. I chose to make a spread for the month of May, but you can do any number of days. Not only will creating this be a creative and calming activity, but after tracking your mood for a month, you’ll be left with a fun and colorful final drawing. Even if there are some bad days, at least something good will be created from that experience.

You will need:

Blank paper

A pencil

A pen or fine tip marker

Colored pencils

Step 1:

Start your mood tracker by creating a key in one section of your page using a pencil - I chose to mark out a corner. I labeled my key with five different moods that I later assigned different colors to. Then, it was time to start the drawing!

Step 2:

Start filling up your drawing with different elements, again using your pencil - feel free to base yours off of what I made, or get creative! I added in different creatures and plants like jellyfish, seaweed, coral, fish, and sea sponges. 

Step 3:

Fill up your page with different elements until you have as many as days you would like to track; for example, since I wanted one for each day of May, I drew 31 total elements. Then, I labeled each with numbers 1-31, keeping consecutive days spread out from one another.

Step 4:

Clean up your drawing by outlining the work you did in pencil using a pen or fine-tip marker. Then, erase the pencil to keep the page neat.

Step 5:

Your mood tracker is ready to use! I picked five colored pencils and assigned one to my five moods in my key. Then, at the end of each day, I color in the element for the corresponding date based on the mood that best matched that day. You can see how my tracker is looking so far this month! Keep going everyday until you fill up each piece of your drawing with one of your colors.