I’m finally beginning to feel settled into my traveler’s notebook system. I bought it last March and wrote about it in Use Tools that You Love. It’s still a process to work out, but it makes it easier to have a dedicated personal notebook outside of the work log notebooks.
The blue leather cover has begun to develop character; I still condition it regularly. It’s equipped with a cloth folder/zipper pouch where I keep pens, my watercolor palette, and a few other odds and ends. Then there’s a weekly planner insert and a regular notebook, right now I’m using one with lightweight paper.
But a notebook really needs to be used, and that’s where you determine when, how, and where. I have two different rhythms for updating mine. Mid-morning, usually with my second cup of coffee (sometimes the third, which is likely decaf), I pause to catch up on the day so far. I doodle and log; I adjust plans. Sketches capture weather conditions, how many cups of coffee or tea I’ve been drinking, appointments, and a quick log of what projects I’m knitting or books I’m reading.
Then after dinner, I sit on the couch and draw more before I settle in to watch TV, snuggle Dot, and work on a knitting or crochet project.
The mid-morning updates keep me tethered to what’s actually happening. The evening doodles are play.
I also have stamps to help bring some consistency to my drawings and for the things I don’t particularly like rendering. I recently added Papergram Shop’s newest offering: micro weather stamps. I’ve had a set of micro tiny shapes for several years and love them.
Of course, as soon as I bought these, I devised a way to sketch the weather that I was liking (on a larger scale), so I need to work out how to incorporate them. I also added a Meal and Waterdrop set, and I’m using the water drop to track what I drink instead of trying to draw my mugs or glasses. These are great, but they live at my desk and don’t go everywhere with me. So the challenge has become how to lay paint or some sort of sketch that will let me add them later.
I’ve settled on dropping a bit of watercolor that indicates what I drank (coffee, tea, matcha, water, wine), and then later when I’m at my desk, I stamp over the dry color. I’m still working out how to indicate something that goes outside the normal span. I’ve used an asterisk (*) if something is very sugary for years (just milk, generally for me with tea and coffee). I figured out adding a tilde (~) underneath the drop for decaf coffee or herbal tea. I think it’s working.
Overall I’m trying to let go of perfectionism in my notebooks. They’ll never look like what I see on Instagram, and I don’t want them to be that great. These are my life, and it’s messy. But I would like to feel more comfortable seeing the messy on paper and accepting what I can and cannot control.
I like things neat and tidy. I love organizing, categorizing, sorting. But I also love coloring outside the lines and embracing the chaos. In kindergarten, I got in trouble for not staying inside the lines, even though that felt more creative and free. I’ve worked on finding the balance between those two impulses for over 40 years. I can spend hours on careful details, but I want to also make space for the messy, imperfect stuff. Recently I’m trying to get back to that looseness in my sketching and page layouts, but it’s a struggle. I may wrestle with the practicality of loose sketches, but I love the aesthetic of slight imperfection.
Lately, each week I focus on one type of object and work on capturing it without being overly grid-like. Obviously, handknits are a favorite because I’m generally wearing something, so it’s easier to try to capture. And I’d like to get better at rendering them. The other week, it was fun to find a way to capture some brights in two different projects. Highlighters plus a waterbrush did a nice job.
This week I thought I’d try my pens and brushes. They look a bit like pick-up sticks scattered on the page right now, not very interesting at all. I probably should have sketched in a hand holding them, a bit like the photo of the spread.
My next goal is to rebuild my habit of sketching “one good thing today” (inspired by a friend’s 3 good things gratitude practice), but I’d fallen out of that and need to restart. It’s a practice I found meaningful. I think as I begin it again, I’ll start with a formal grid structure as that’s easier for me to fill in each day. Eventually I’d love to become looser, perhaps filling a week in a “draw your day” style such as how Samantha Dion Baker often does.
This weekend, as the snow falls (we’re expecting at least a foot, followed by frigid conditions with windchills around -8°F!), I plan to curl up with Cas Holman’s book Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity and the growing pile of library books on my desk.
For me, doodling is my play. I don’t expect to ever be a great watercolor urban sketch artist, and I honestly don’t want to be. I want to have fun.
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