I have been extremely busy these past weeks and I find I get a bit out of sorts when I am away from the studio for long periods of time. Work gets put aside and sometimes forgotten and I feel like I lose momentum. One way that I recharge and re-align my sense of momentum is just by looking. My long time mentor Brian Walker taught me the value of observation as an important part of study. It's a sill that I honed in on during my botanical illustration course and now I am applying it in other ways. My study time has brought me back to the work of Daniel T. Ames. Daniel Ames is a long time hero of mine and his work is best seen in The Ames Compendium. You can also see one of his
notebooks on IAMPETH.com. What is fascinating about Ames is his broad range of styles and his notebooks show very different levels of expertise. Some of the work looks incredibly polished while other pieces look quite rough. This is the very purpose of a notebook, scrapbook or journal. Not all of our work will be our best. Some of it we shudder to let others see. But it is there to capture moments and provides prompts for us to remember key moments or ideas. I am constantly working in mine and love the process of just putting the pencil on paper. I dug out one of my journals from 2010. This one is filled with drawings for Enchanted Letter workshops that I have presented over the years.
The thoughts and techniques are captured on the paper even though the finished design is long gone somewhere. I still remember the process of design through the journal. Some of my pages are more polished than others. Some I wonder what I was thinking at all.
But every page taught me something and I am glad I have it to refer back to.
I tend to go overboard with study. I love learning, honing skills and practicing. But summer schedules can be hard to keep up with. Life can be overwhelming at any season and time can escape no matter what our intentions are. One way you can take some pressure off yourself is just capturing ideas, thoughts or sketches in a journal. Just let it be what it is without a specific goal or study routine. Whether you work in pencil or ink like Daniel Ames, just have the freedom to explore ideas. Pencil practice translates into skills with the pen so don't worry if your journal never sees ink. If you keep the journal to refer back to, great. If you toss it out at the end of the book, that's great too. It did what it was supposed to do.
