Last week: December Daily

As I indicated to those of you who receive my monthly newsletter, I am doing a new personal project this month. It is not really much different from what I have been doing over the last few weeks, but it has a slightly different emphasis. Sometimes I wish I could just do the same things over and over, but I always seem to be going off on tangents exploring new completely random stuff! This is definitely one of those occasions!

To cut a long story short, in recent investigations into how bloggers from other communities (travel, food, lifestyle, craft) do things, I have found myself in the midst of scrapbooking world (whoa! I am so NOT a scrapbooker!) Modern scrapbooking is a lot different from the mental image I have in my head, so it has been fun to discover some cool contemporary and even minimal approaches to it. In my ramblings, I discovered Ali Edwards and was very interested in her emphasis on storytelling. She has a project running at the moment called December Daily and I watched some of her videos about how she records a story a day during December. I was really trying to find something different (not sketching related) to explore as a mental rest during my evenings, but I ended up discovering some exciting concepts that I want to explore. So much for a rest, my mind is buzzing with lots of news ideas!

I am not doing a proper December Daily album – more like a sketchers version of it – but I am exploring a few different things this month in response to some great concepts I absorbed from Ali. I don’t really do Christmas, but December still has a special character about it (extemely busy trying to wrap up all the loose ends of the year and the lovely feeling of summer holidays just around the corner) so that is what I want to record. I also want to try to improve the storytelling aspect of my sketches, play around a little more with collage and try to use a slightly Christmasy palette of green and red (stretched to include pale green, pink and peach) . So not my normal choice of colours.

Since, like everyone else, December is a really busy month, I am not really putting a lot of thought into my pages. The collage happens randomly, making snap decisions (and worrying about why I did it later!) but it is interesting to discover how much fun sticking things into my book is becoming, and as I said earlier, how much it is freeing me up to be less precious about my sketchbook. I think that exciting new things can happen when you find the right ‘state of play’. I have already noticed that I had generated a few very different compositions as a result of the collage. December is not really the time of the year to commit to a new intensive drawing project but this collage-based one is feeling good so far! And just for the record, I half suspect that January will be completely collage free!

I have also thinking about the difference between scrapbooking (or creating photo albums – which I used to do) and sketching. While it is easier to take a quick photo to capture a moment, the actual putting of the album together can be a chore. What I love so much about sketching is that it happens in the moment! I might finish off the sketch and add some additional elements and text later, but the bulk of the ‘memory keeping’ happens at the time, making it richly connected with the story itself. In addition, because of the tactile engagement of hand and paper at the time, it seems to stay in my memory much clearer than if I just took a photo.

Anyway… that’s enough rambling today. You can read below some more in my ‘intentions’ page (an Ali idea).

Among the bits and pieces in this week you will see some new brushes (more about this later), a new resolution to have a green smoothie a day and the exciting news of a new member to the crazy clan – a niece! Aunty Liz is feeling very blessed to have her special family expanded!

These are gold letters….