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Justin's Obsidian Academy

8. Visual Journal

TL;DR — Add mood: and event: frontmatter to your daily note. The nano-banana skill generates an abstract image representing that day’s state, saves it next to the note as 10-Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.png, and embeds it. End of year: 365 images that visually map your year.

A low-stakes, high-delight workflow. Don’t take it too seriously.

When to use it

Section titled “When to use it”
  • End of day, when you fill in the evening review section
  • Catch-up batch: generate the last week’s images on Sunday during weekly review
  • Looking back: re-render an old day with a different art style and see how it changes the read

Frontmatter the skill reads:

---
date: 2026-05-15
mood: focused
energy: 8
event: shipped the api refactor
weather: drizzle
---

The skill builds a prompt like:

“Abstract digital painting. Mood: focused. Energy: high. Visual metaphor: completing a long technical project under soft drizzly light. Soft palette: deep teal, off-white, hint of warm orange. Minimal composition, generous negative space. No text.”

Under the hood

Section titled “Under the hood”
  • Skill location: ~/.claude/skills/nano-banana/SKILL.md (the same skill, different invocation)
  • Reads: today’s 10-Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md frontmatter
  • Writes: 10-Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.png (~400 KB JPEG/PNG, 1408×768)
  • Tool: gemini --yolo "/generate 'prompt'" under the hood
  • Cost: ~$0.045–0.07 per image, well within free-tier daily limit

Watch out for

Section titled “Watch out for”
  • Don’t filter for “good” days. The point is honesty across time. Bad days deserve images too — drab tones tell a story.
  • Style consistency — pick one art style and stick with it for at least 30 days before changing. Otherwise the gallery looks chaotic, not coherent.
  • Filename ≠ embedded image — Obsidian Markdown embeds use ![[YYYY-MM-DD.png]]. The skill adds this for you, but check on first run.
  • Mobile sync size — Syncthing pushes the PNGs to your S26+. Over a year you’ll have ~50–150 MB of journal images. Fine, but plan storage.
Section titled “Gallery”

End of month / year, build a 40-Resources/visual-journal-YYYY-MM.md that uses Obsidian’s image gallery or the Dataview plugin to show the month’s images in a grid. Or use the Gallery component on a published version.

Make it yours

Section titled “Make it yours”
  • Pick a signature palette — e.g., earth tones, monochrome blue, pastel. Encode in the skill’s prompt template.
  • Add a “year-end remix” workflow that picks the 12 most representative images and lays them out as a poster.
  • Layer text — version 2: also overlay one word from your evening review onto the image (use the nanobanana extension’s /edit command).
Section titled “Related workflows”
Daily Driver Provides the daily note this skill reads
Content Engine Same nano-banana skill, different use case