How art concepts apply to writing

Anne Wilson, Topographies, from Mouth to Mouth Mag

I remember piling into my intro art and design classes with other sleepy-eyed freshmen to learn how to draw, paint, and critique. We were taught how to see and to talk about a piece objectively, not just what we liked or disliked. We talked about craft and attention to detail. When it came to subjectivity, we were taught to point out what was or was not working, and why.

Laura Miller at Salon.com this week tells us Why we love bad writing, and one of her reasons is about flow:

Novels are praised for being a "fast read" and above all for having writing that "flows." "Flow" is an especially fascinating term because it's one that literary critics have never used, and it perfectly captures the way that clichéd prose can be gobbled up in chunks at a breakneck pace.

I'm interested in her attention to "flow" because it does get used in visual arts and design. It's how your eye moves, or how the line work or composition flows. To me, books that flow do not always equate cliche. As M. D. (Dom) Benoit asks, "Plot vs. quality. What a concept. Why not both?"

How does an art concept like flow apply to writing? There is something seamless and tight about prose that flows. It means something is working below the surface to grab a reader or viewer's attention and hold them tight.

So, what do you think, why not both? 

Hello, Creative Block!

It started off innocently enough. A day or two of procrastination. Then stuff came up. And then more stuff. And then someone asked me about my book, and all of a sudden, I felt like a writer-impersonator.

It happens that fast, I marveled.

While the writer world tapped to the NaNoWriMo beat this past November, I wrote a scene here, a mock-interview with my protagonist there, my words moving at a trickle. I put everything I had into my first draft in August, but still thought I'd keep myself buoyed up by NaNo adrenaline. I know others, like MadMemoirist, could relate to feeling out of sync with the month-long no-holds-barred writing feast. We sent each other tweets of support - you go girl! aim for low word count! hang out on the couch and enjoy your TV over the roar of the NaNo crowd!

I have a parenting rule of thumb, though: when I want to retreat, get closer. Get down on the ground on my knees, pull child to chest, get closer. It almost never fails to soothe and stop a problem from getting bigger. Sometimes I don't know what I'm supposed to do - but I stop and ask myself about my reaction, rather than theirs: if I want to leave the room, I make myself stay. Creative types, especially if you are HSP like me, will understand why you'd want to shut out the stimulation, but it works.

Here are two posts this week that helped me get closer to why I was having creative block (hint: the ubiquitous internal editor), and helped me get back to the book:

-Judith van Praag's NaNoWriMo Editor/Devil - Git Friendly or Git!
-Chris Brogan's You Are So Stupid

How do you know when to get closer or walk away from a creative project?

Essential words & Quiet drawings

Paintings take up wall and storage space. Image files, as I discovered this week haunting my backup files, take up vast amounts of virtual space. Years of making paintings, illustrations, and drawings, and I have thousands of images stored.  Originals. Duplicates. Different scales and formats.

I'm aware of the outpouring of images I have to share vs. the amount of words that will fill the 'Writer' pages of my revamped website. For art, there are slide shows options and collections of visual projects. I write every day, but such a small percentage of it surfaces. Writing files and folders multiply as I add lines and paragraphs here and there like I would shade a drawing. All those words to reveal just the most essential few. 

Is there something you quietly pursue knowing it will take shape later?

A fantastic conversation with Maggie Sutrov in Maui will be making it's way to my Art is Dialogue podcast soon. Sometimes a conversation is the best way to bring those sketched out, typed out ideas to life. Enjoy her lovely quiet drawings in Markings, her live, hand-illustrated story.

Markings: Of drawing, horses, and art from our earliest times.

by Maggie T. Sutrov

Learning curve

Several times a year I take on projects that are more than I can handle. I make sure that they are outside of my area of expertise, and keep me up late at night problem solving. Like writing a book in August and revising it while redoing my website and this blog at the same time.

My dreams as of late have been preceded by images of navigation bars, widgets, and CSS code, or snatches of dialogue from a story that I feel is emerging slowly compared to the gusto with which it was born over the summer.

In order to make myself feel better and ensure more procrastination, I downloaded these fantastic essential (free!) story outlining worksheets and checklists from Karen S. Wiesner's From First Draft to Finished Novel and am printing all 50 pages. The sound of the printer is soothing, and it offsets my guilt about paper and trees and all the ink I'm wasting. Not to mention the printer I have uses cartridges only available in the US, so it requires serious finagling to refill them.

A new job teaching (screaming!) English to grade school and middle school kids has me way out of my comfort zone, too.

Are there projects you take on that you know are worth the steep learning curve? 

Show, don't tell

Illustration for PAWI writing club

Artists tend to know this concept intimately: show, don't tell. Writers are beseeched to embrace it, but art is all about showing, even when work like Nancy Spero's The Torture of Women from 1976 includes jarring, typewritten layers of text. 

In conversation yesterday with Julie Tallard Johnson, we talked about her book The Wheel of Initiation and stating intention for creative work. 

Stating intention is like showing instead of telling, being clear on why you choose to be present in this moment.

Being mindful is, like Diana Baur talks about in her post A Case for Mindfulness, "the practice of not missing out on your life because you were too fragmented to really notice.  If there is no other case to be made for mindfulness, it would be this fact alone."

Having an interest in, and studying mindfulness, is much different than being present. Mindfulness outside of my creative work does not come easy. One ear on the kids and while I try to focus on whatever task I have set out before me. Half-listening while I'm thinking of everything I want to get done. High sensitivity to sensory overload. I go into my work with such intensity that everything outside of it can sound like one long clanging bell trying to get my attention that I tune out.

Hmm.

That's a whole lot of telling, not showing. And several really good, clever excuses to avoid being mindful. Sounds a lot like Steven Pressfield's definition of resistance in The War of Art. 

What holds you back from being mindful?

______________________________

Thanks to Elmira Bayraslı for sharing Nancy Spero's The Torture of Women with me, and Kari Anito Moe for pointing me to Diana Baur's A Case for Mindfulness. 

Pop culture vs. high art?

I'm a latecomer to the Glee obsession. My August NaNoWriMo writing binge was followed by three days of the first season of Glee with breaks to sleep, eat, shower, and feed my kids. It has become a post-project ritual to dive into entire seasons of shows and catch up on movies I've missed. Glee is research, I reason. I just finished the first draft of a young adult novel and don't want to appear clueless about American pop culture.

At the same time, I've been following along with the Franzen-Picoult-Weiner debate, a discussion on the extensive coverage of Jonathan Franzen's newly released book, Freedom, sparked by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner. Bestselling writers Picoult and Weiner argue Franzen's star treatment makes commercial writers, especially commercial women writers, look excluded from the literary boy's club.

Glee and the FPW debate both point to the supposed pop culture vs. high art divide. Seven examples show Glee and FPW might not make such strange bedfellows. 

1. Opposites attract. Glee club and football practice. Reading Alain de Botton followed by Candace Bushnell. We need variety or get bored as a species. Where would we be without the complementary colors on a color wheel? We're uncomfortable with consumption, but don't want to have to choose just one type of cultural food. While I love the rich flavor of a yogurt lassi made from scratch, drinking diet Cherry Coke reminds me of going to the dollar theatre with my best friend for double features. One summer I read as many of the Stephanie Plum books I could find while traveling through Europe. I ate at a Burger King in Groningen, the Netherlands with a Dutch friend who'd spent time in the States and was not repelled by Americana.

Can you be comfortable with fusion and relish variation and opposites?

2. Readers and viewers like a good show. Bestsellers make readers excited. What happens next? A bestselling author knows how to keep their readers guessing and coming back for more. Likewise, the buildup to Franzen's book release was borderline fanatic and giddy. It's not about good or bad, it's about getting a show. Glee, without a doubt, made me flashback to high school. My most quietest introverted friend forever captured the heart of my 1997 senior class by dancing along to I Will Survive in a sparkling blue floor-length gown to thunderous applause. Want to keep people interested? Surprise them.

3. They bring out the love and the hate. Met many people indifferent to Glee, Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner? Unlikely.

4. Competition makes people sport their full regalia. Glee is obvious with its costumes, but couldn't it also be said that writers rise to the occasion when they defend their genre? We get to see who throws a literary punch better than someone else, who can write themselves out of their corner, who just thinks its a colossal waste of their time to care and retreats to their bench. It's the thrill of the fight, not choosing the winner, that keeps us enthralled.

5. After it gets duked it out, everyone gets back to work. Write, dance, paint, sew, whatever the creative preoccupation, everyone gets back to it. Or risks losing their jobs or passion in life. Smart creative people never show every trick at one time to conserve energy for the work.

6. The line between pop culture and high art is blurry. Andy Warhol is the classic example of an artist who inserted himself into pop culture while satirically criticizing the mainstream. Despite its cast of misfits, the Glee soundtrack has sold 7 million copies.

7. They point to what people care about. And sometimes what people care about makes no sense. Sometimes it seems pointless. Awful. Sometimes it seems noble. Sometimes it is the voice that breaks the silence. As an observer, it is fascinating. And there's not more fertile stuff for novel writing than the tension between two opposing sides.

There's something really attractive about liking something you're not supposed to. 

When do you unleash your inner high artist and pop culture fanatic? Do you take sides?

Monsters, irascible inner critics, and Merilee

"Hybrids are used to strengthen the homogeneous. Grafting different orchids together makes flowers nobody has ever seen before. Cross-pollinating makes hardier fruits and vegetables. Hybrid cars are more energy efficient. Not one, or the other. Both. Conjoined. The hybrid/monster can be sensed even from the shadows. Poison Ivy left behind her traces of vanilla scent. The snakes in Medusa’s hair hissed." 

 - Sezin Koehler, from a hybrid/MONSTER manifesto

When I read The Fluent Self, I find myself enmeshed in Havi's language, the way she talks to monsters like inner critics, doubts, and fears. I've been hanging out with my inner writing critic since I started writing stories on yellow legal paper in this maroon recliner in our farmhouse over two decades ago. I discarded the stories over and over because I didn't like how I had written the words. I didn't like how the words looked. I was obsessed with perfect transcription and had no idea that a first draft could be messy and alive.

I think about the 9-year-old me who threw crumpled pieces of paper on the floor because she thought writers were always surrounded by their maimed, discarded thoughts. The opposite of cultivating a creative life.

Once proud of moving overseas with only a few suitcases, I now have stuff spilling over. And not just physical stuff, but also taking time to work on things that I love, building in quiet time into my otherwise bell-clanging-kid-filled day. Words fill up space. Ideas fill up space. Sometimes our own thoughts seem insurgent to the ones before them and that thinking takes up space. How do we live with conflicting ideas? Mediate. 

I'm in the middle of making 1,600 words a day for thirty days come to life. These run-at-full-tilt-projects are what keep me energized and fueled up.

It's a lot easier to take a break from my irascible inner critic thanks to the 15-year-old girl in my head telling me what to do. Not my adolescent self. Merilee. The girl in my NaNoWriMo novel who's father writes eulogies for a living and who's in love with a celebrity. Totally not my thing to write about celebrities - it's all Merilee's doing.

And then there's this other way of looking at monsters: Sezin Koehler's collaborative hybrid/Monster project is a glimpse into how letting the shadowy side of our selves be visible can create rich, creative, multifarious ideas of beauty.

What are your monsters, and do they ever help you discover something wonderful? 

Voice lessons from a hybrid ambassador

HYBRID AMBASSADORS: a blog-ring project of Dialogue2010
You met our multinational cultural innovators this spring in a roundtable discussion of hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now in these interconnected blog posts they share reactions to a recent polarizing book promotion at SheWrites. Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010

Every day, from my Twitter stream to my blog reader, there’s a controversial topic that captures my attention. Poised on the edge of typing in a heated response or writing a blog post in reaction, my surety wavers. I’m at a precipice, knowing that if I chose to go further, I commit publicly to an idea or a belief that is part of a larger mosaic of my online identity.

I acknowledge that my words could leave a trail of anger and resentment or a digital footprint of critical thinking, empathy, and support.

Can I admit that sometimes I don't know when to jump in or when to watch from the sidelines? That insecurity surfaces when I feel my voice isn't loud enough? Or would be silenced before it is given a chance to be heard?

Case in point a Countdown to Publication post on SheWrites by author Lori L. Tharps. The platform gives Lori, and other selected writers, an audience of 10,000 plus women with whom to share their progress marketing and publishing their books. In Wanted: White Ambassadors to Help Me Cross Over, Lori appeals to white women to promote her book because of the publishing industry's failure to market their writers of color to white audiences. Segregated bookshelves are a reality. SheWrites Advisory Board member and author Tayari Jones writes about 'The Colored Section' in a guest post on Maud Newton, part of a reader-led discussion.

The problem was the how, not why, though there are so many resources for authors promoting their work through platform building that I was surprised by the entreaty. Like this on artistic revolution, this on writers of the future, and this on interactions being personal, not business. Not surprising is that people read Lori's post and reacted personally. 

When some people spoke up about the awkward, jocular tone of the post, their reaction was interpreted as being an attempt to humiliate the author, an unwillingness to support her, and a reluctance to engage in a discussion on race. Others pointed out they wanted to help Lori, but were critical of her casual conclusion that 'if you're white and you like these authors, you might like my book, and if you do, your other white friends might like it, too.' Those critics were seen as infringing on Lori's right to free speech. Only those who heartily agreed to tell their white friends about the book were applauded. Anyone who brought up alternative ways to spread the word about her work was called a 'detractor' and told to keep their thoughts to themselves. The comment section was rife with disquiet. 

Featured homepage content, like Countdown to Publication, is considered proprietary to SheWrites. "White Ambassadors" is on its Facebook Wall and was included in its newsletter. Lori's post is endorsed by SheWrites at the same time that their second credo is "community has the power to nurture and sustain creativity."

What if what is perceived as a negative comment is actually a call to action by people who want to support you? Why the slap on the wrist by other commenters to the people who wanted to bring in a perspective they felt was missing from the post?

***

Lori L. Tharps's forthcoming novel Substitute Me is about two women with lives that are in contrast - in other words, rich/poor, black/white, though it's claimed neither to be a 'black' or 'white' story, but a story about women. She describes it as a tale of "modern-day motherhood" that "all women can relate to." 

There's no way all mothers everywhere get along and have the same ideas of motherhood. And if the book's about womanhood, why the outdated idea that women and babies always go together in the same sentence? For a writer who's steeped in the nuances of being outside the dominant majority, has traveled the world, married a Spaniard, is raising biracial kids, wrote the acclaimed Kinky Gazpacho and co-authored Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, the generalizations about who her readers might be are surprising. As Chimamanda Adichie says, the problem with stereotypes is not that they aren't true, but that they are "half the story," and the single story "emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar."

I didn't comment. Fear of being lambasted by other SheWrites members stopped me. One contrarian was called "uncivil" for objecting to the breezy, cheeky feel of the post. It could have been an enlightening dialogue on publishing and 'culture collide,' like on Lori's interesting and contemplative blog, but instead it was on upholding polarity as a life and work model.  The publishing industry has changed and it means more authors can take matters into their own hands instead of relying on traditional publishing models. Being resigned to "the way things are" is a sign of not believing in your own power.  If you want word of mouth promotion, you need your readers to love your voice and not feel alienated by it.

Hybrids know what it is like to not fit in anywhere, or to have a delicate sense of fitting in at any one time.

Maybe that's why the White Ambassadors post stings so much - it makes the worn out conjecture that everyone subscribes to a binary way of life. It is a bleak reminder that assumption about inclusion in a group based on the color of one's skin is still the elephant in the room. 

At the Women and Work conference held in March in Turin, Italy, on the anniversary of the first women's conference in 1910, I joined more than twenty women bloggers from emerging nations to talk about ways to bridge our differences through social media. Rather than deepen divisions, we mapped new territory with excitement and first-hand experience that unifying can lead to change and growth. Which is why I'm speaking up. This is in my own neighborhood, after all. I'm using my voice to draw attention to what I think was a missed opportunity to garner wide-ranging perspectives and to forge one's own path instead of doing the expected. 

I'm sorry, Lori, I didn't do what you asked. I went out and told all of my friends about your book. 

More thoughts on this subject from fellow HYBRID AMBASSADORS:
Catherine Yiğit's Special-ism
Anastasia Ashman's Great White People Book Club
Sezin Koehler's Whites Only?
Tara Lutman Ağaçayak's Circles
Catherine Bayar's Thicker Skin
Judith van Praag's We Write History Today
Elmira Bayraslı's The Color of Writing
Jocelyn Eikenburg's The Problem with "Chinese Food"

Who was Lethe Bashar?

I knew him by his pseudonym, Lethe Bashar, but his real name was Chris. In the middle of him editing my short story The Mercy Troupers for Escape into Life, I realized his Twitter name had changed to Chris Al-Aswad.


"Who's Chris?" I asked.


"That's my real name," he said.


Lethe Bashar was the author of Novel of Life and Sentimental Education: Essays in Art.  A quick search on him and hundreds of pages testify to his prolific body of work and the number of people who read it.


I said, "So that's what happens when a pen name becomes you."


Chris wrote obsessively about art. He was gifted in showcasing artists, painters, writers, and thinkers on Escape Into Life. He brought my story to life through a handful of 140 character messages and short emails.


I didn't realize our friendship would also be so brief. Chris's obituary is in the Chicago Sun-Times. In his last blog post he writes about Sentimental Education: Essays in Art,


"I hope these essays carry a sense of experimental wonder to whomever reads them; also a love of beautiful forms, and a sadness toward self-destruction."


Thank you, Chris, for being a vital part of my journey. Your work was a gift to so many.  


image: Chris's Twitter avatar, attributed to Courbet.

Summer stories

In the maroon recliner in our living room with the overhead fan whirling, I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn And Maggie-Now every summer until we moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota. My reading grew to include contraband paperbacks I hid behind bookshelves and the now defunct Sassy magazine.  My first summer in Turkey I read everything by Jane Austen. I measured periods of time by the books I read and the beverages I drank while processing the melodic, confusing sounds of Turkish. 

This summer I have my own story to offer - The Mercy Troupers, set in the desert and trailer parks to the tune of evangelical roadies. I scratched out the first draft when I was 21 and sitting on a park bench next to Lake Mendota. Now ten years later it's the first story I've published.

Another summer tale, shot on our Canon Powershot SX10IS and edited in iMovie, is a casting video for House Hunters International. The video peeks into our home and neighborhood in Izmit. It's a love story. And a story about leaving home.

What story, book or otherwise, is captivating you right now?

How do you identify your center?

Ferries and mosques, seagulls and bridges. Quintessential imagery of Istanbul. 

In drawings and flashes of ideas, many that remain untapped in Jungian shadows, I explore the reasons I am here and not there. I write and make art to ask questions and explore the answers, not to wear the painter's hat. Different vehicles, same driver. 

Christina Katz talks about what's at the center of your writing career, essentially what you are offering in the work you do. Her metaphor is espresso at Starbucks, and how from that one elixir of life, all forms of frothy and mentally-stimulating drinks can be made. Being in several fields at the same time - art, writing, design, curating - has me tapping walls like a contractor looking for support beams to find a clear and direct way to say exactly what it is I'm offering. 

It's an ever-evolving task. Shifting from mommy mode to artist mode to editor. When I tap into a creative flow, it turns me on. Makes me know that positive, life-affirming change can happen when you do what you love.

How do you identify your center? Does your center of gravity shift with time?

Watercolor images copyright Rose Deniz.

The postscript explains it all

I love P.S.'s. I love footnotes and hidden messages. But these days it's all about becoming visible. Finding your voice.

Whatever phraseology you choose, this week Havi nudges me to consider that being visible and putting stuff out there = terrifying but doesn't mean I can get away with not putting stuff out there. Anastasia Ashman replies that the process of becoming visible is about 'expanding your comfort zone', Tara Lutman Ağaçayak calls it 'do what you love,' and Julie Stuart enticingly names it the 'sweetspot'.

There's been confluence the last few weeks about eradicating lingering self-doubts. Elaine Aron's book on linking and ranking suggests there are better and easier ways to be out in the world, to nurture the undervalued self, beyond pushing one's way into the front of the line. Like practicing, absorbing one's surroundings, and waiting for the right, pivotal moment. If you have sensitivity to subtle energies, as Kari describes it, there are still times one needs to run the risk of failing.

Pushing to the front of the line reminds me of attending Elif Şafak's lecture this afternoon at the second-annual book fair Kocaeli has ever hosted. Throngs of people. A woman confessing how much Elif's books moved her. Another young hopeful asking for advice about what one should do if they want to be a writer.

Elif's answer: write, share it with other writers, send to magazines, share it with a writer's group, start a critique/book club like they do in the US, read blogs, start a blog, don't get down if you don't get published right away, write, keep going.

In other words: show up, do your work, live your life.

What's your secret rhythm, where's your niche?


P.S. My husband hardly ever reads my blog (right babe?) but it's our five year anniversary today. Five years ago, my life in Turkey had just begun with a bed, a couple plastic chairs in our kitchen, and a row of Efes beer bottles on our floor thanks to my friends who flew over the ocean to dance to Bryan Adams and Turkish pop music at our wedding while I nudged Devrim to please-god-change-the-music. I couldn't speak Turkish, but I could nod along and appear interested. This bought me a year to learn a few phrases. Now we're two languages, two babies, years of unfolded laundry, and one renovated apartment later. Happy Anniversary, love!

On the way to Ortaköy

This morning I boarded a bus in Izmit to cross a continent* to walk past Çırağan Palas where there was no one on the street save for a few couples and men pushing carts, where after leaving Beşiktaş only a block or two down the road on my way to Ortaköy there was a fire that a man hobbled in front of wearing a worn-down green sweater. The fire looked like muddy leaves aflame, the kind where brush and tree branches and leaves got swept together into a great or not-so-great pile and were lit to remove debris or clean out metal garbage cans.

Until we realized, all of us on the street, including a police officer at the police station across from the fire that was just staring at it while talking to another man quietly, until we realized the small fire had started shooting up another floor.

This is a real fire, I thought, and kept my head craned towards the orange spit canvassing the stone exterior until a headwaiter in a suit and tie emerged from a restaurant with a fire extinguisher, and the sound of “ssshhh ssshhh-ing” filled the nearly empty Sunday morning street.

Triumphant, he looked around while all along the street valet attendants were on their cell phones doing what, not calling the police because the police were already politely watching the scene, and I didn’t hear a fire truck once.

*from the Asian side to European side of Istanbul to meet the lovely Keryn, Renai and Verity in person, where after many months of blog reading and admiring the timing was right and the continent right to drink coffee in person and discuss photography, expatriotism, mothering, and milestones. 

Harika

Last night I interrupted the making of roasted pumpkin and carrot soup (with coconut milk, onions and garlic, in case you are interested...) to check my email and found my very first official rejection letter for a story I wrote. These days things happen so quickly that I have little time to actually react before I jump to the next thing, like making sure the navy beans in the pressure cooker didn't explode while Topi and Lina take turns putting tiny balls of play-doh under everything, but I did actually think a few things that came rapidly: oh, okay, and wow, they actually sent a response instead of letting it disappear in the void (or spam). And then, I felt it was official. I've finally joined the ranks of other writers because I've officially been rejected. This is great! Now I only need like ten more rejections and then I'll start to think I'm getting somewhere.

 

Turkish fabric - edgy florals

So far has been a week of some doors closing and others opening (though I'm still kind of waiting for the green light somewhere) in many ways, and just when I think I can get away from some kind of shift in the universe making each and every hour a taxing test of my patience, I find little reminders that it's not over yet. So bodes this week. In the meantime I'm reading French Women Don't Get Fat thanks to Tara who lent it to me after a wonderful Sunday brunch at her house and employing all my best procrastination techniques to avoid doing whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing this week. Getting Things Done was not in the weekly forecast.

Over at IC, I wrote last week about the editing process for artists and designers. While writing it, it gave me an opportunity to see just how I work and why. I'd say I'm in step 8 of my own list, going back to work and examining all the possibilities of what could be new projects. In my opinion, this is the most uncomfortable stage. All the previous projects are done, the clean up is finished and now it's time to focus on something new. Like my toddler's birthday bash in an hour... 20 toddlers and cake, oh my.

*Harika means amazing, fabulous, splendid...

Rainy Day Pages

Just after having said we were having sunny days perfect for photo ops, I woke up to rain drenched sidewalks and brilliantly green trees and grass from an early morning storm. Not the ideal day for hanging laundry outside, but I've got a down comforter on the line that I hope won't take three days to dry. Rainy days make me want to cozy up and make things more than on sunny days, and I've taken a few pictures of recent notebook pages in progress. I'm never sure when a page is 'done' but it usually happens after I see enough disparate things working together, like mixed and matched patterns, contrasting colors, pale palettes against complicated surfaces. I usually use a graphic notebook or line free sketch pad, but this time I found a kraft paper journal at a stationery store and thought I'd give it a try.


If you journal and sketch, what kind of notebook do you prefer?