While making diary comics brings many joys with it, I’ve found it also presents its own unique set of challenges: namely what to do with those days that just don’t seem to stand out. In theory, I can only draw so many comics about me sitting in cafes drawing comics before we all start to get a bit bored with it. 

A few years ago I was chatting about this problem with a friend, Elizabeth Alley, [https://www.elizabethalley.com/]  a gifted painter and sketch artist who also makes diary comics. 

We talked about missing the element of surprise and about the difficulty of bringing fresh eyes to your days when they sometimes feel so repetitive. To answer these challenges, we came up with a way to randomize it and push ourselves a bit more: rolling dice. Hammering down all the details took us a number of delightful video calls (in the pre-pandemic days, no less) and a bit of trial and error, but we finally figured out a workable system that would be accessible for someone just starting out but also challenging for anyone with years of diary comics under their proverbial belt.

Here are the instructions (in comic form, of course) along with a few sample pages. We hope you give it a try!

And here are just a few pages I have made using this technique.