Sunday night I was dog tired. A wonderfully busy weekend filled with all good things, but as usual - little in the way of art or writing.
Too tired to do any serious work on a Sunday night. Besides, I am trying to turn off the compunction to be "doing" all weekend long. I decided I deserved a nice cup of tea and and a little linger on the laptop.
I didn't start out meaning to do it, but I found myself deep into Pinterest and art journals and sketchbook blogs. I found myself starting that syndrome of clicking through on link after link, intrigued and attracted by amazing painters, sketchers, and mixed media journal pages. Then I began clicking on paints and watercolor and gouaches and filling out order forms I could never fulfill without going bankrupt.
Then I saw someone's journal that stopped me cold. I'm sure you all know Pikland, which is an amazing illustration blog. I traced a pin of a pin of a pin and ended up on her blog and ran across this fantastic and completely simple idea: Quoteskine. I know that commonplace books have been around since the beginning of the written word, but I whenever I thought of keeping one, it seemed so detail oriented that I was turned off.
Now, I see Lee Crutchely's marvelous book and it combines my current passion for lettering (I'm having so much fun addressing the wedding invitations with a calligraphy pen and rich blue ink) and my new somewhat silly fascination with amazing song lyrics that I hear. (One day I will write a post about rediscovering indie music in my 50's and how going to concerts is like rediscovering my twenty-year old self. Soon as I figure out how to do it without embarassing my children.)
The cool part is the lettering and illustration. I find lettering to be very meditative and having to make only the simplest of decisions such as serif or sans serif is exactly the type of art experience I can handle after a long day at a computer or in court.
You can purchase his Quoteskine (I am!) at his shop.
Anyhow, I have started my own Quoteskine, called Words I Live For, which is pretty mundane, but I'm working on a better title.
Over the years, I've tried to keep multiple journals and I have to say that eventually, I don't keep one up and then another and before long, I not keeping a sketchbook or journal at all. I'm not proud to admit that, but my track record ends up with many, many incomplete journals. I do much better with just one journal that everything goes into.
But I've been thinking about how scattered I feel lately. I can't seem to get any one thing to take hold of me and ground me for a length of time. Maybe I should reconsider keeping multiple journals, if I can figure out how to define them so their categorization leads to a synthesis of work and not a refraction.
Something simple like a quote journal, but one that allows me to be outrageous with lettering is such a sweet idea for me. When I think of it I just smile! It will be pure play.
Then how about my other preocupation of developing an illustration style? I've been gathering illustration books and bookmarking illustrators whose work I admire and copying their style as a way of training my own hand and eye to develop a style. So instead of random sketch pages all over the house, why not have a journal that is just for illustration techniques?
A steadfast love of mine is painting, watercolors in particular. I miss it so much as I haven't done any since the fall. I have a gigantic moleskine that I bought on sale and started filling up over the summer, but then it turned into a sketchpad, notepad, and soon it just looked like every other journal I've done - without a point of view.
So why not keep it just for painting, lush, vibrant dreamy paintings? But not just any paintings - for my story paintings. For those characters and stories that flit in and out of my head, fill mynights with dreams, and get me spinning yarns that might never see the light of day except to me - in my journal.Th journal that would be the most personal, the one that best reflects my dual identity as artist and writer.
It would be - that's right - The Golden Notebook!
Seriously, I can really before I get all Doris Lessing on you and end up overthinking, overintellectualizing, and over analyzing my own creativity, which is what I do and why I fail, let's just try to keep this "playful".
As I always say to myself, I have a career; I have an income; I have a lot of responsibility in my life. Do I want art to be the same or do I want art to be the source of joy and passion in my life?
I just find it very satisfying to think of having 3 journals on my night table to turn to each evening:
- the lettering journal
- the illustration journal - a workspace for learning, for notetaking, experimenting, and keeping track of ideas
- the story journal - my dreams, my inspiration, my half-told ideas spun out.
Surely if they are on the night table, along with my pens, my watercolor palette, some brushes, and pencils, I will not only have it right by my side to encourage me to work, but I hope that working in each will help me clarify my creative aspirations each day and help me organize my thoughts.
The quotes and phrases that I enter into the lettering journal will feed the illustration journal with ideas, which in turn will feed the story journal with stories.
That should work, right??
Why do I see the Leaning Tower of Pisa Journals teetering and toppling onto my head in the middle of the night?
Perhaps it's time to rethink this.
