You Can See Yesterday’s Design Recharge Webinar with Me, Now on YouTube

On February 11, 2015 Diane Gibbs had me as a guest on Design Recharge. 

She recorded the program and you can see it here on YouTube if the above video doesn’t work.

We were set to talk about Fake Journaling because International Fake Journal Month is coming up. I got a little side tracked on some topics and we ran out of time to talk much about IFJM, but we talked a lot about sketching, visual journaling, and how my mom kept dropping me off in the woods at 4 o’clock in the morning. (She meant it kindly.)

So if you would like to hear all that you can do that now. I think it’s about one hour and seven minutes.

I want to thank the people who joined in for the live chat to send in questions and to provide links and such. You were all great. I got a little distracted by the scroll thing. (Diane told me not to bother looking at it and she’d take care of it, which she did, but you know I had to peek.)

There were a couple places I misspoke. I said that sketch of the finch in red ink with the Pilot Parallel Pen was 7 x 9 inches and my mind was actually thinking 5 x 7 inches (which is small for me these days). You can see more of these sketches using the pilot parallel pen if you click here or go to the category list and click on it there. There is a whole series of birds, all saying something obnoxious; and there are sketches of people made with that pen as well. I think it’s a pretty fun tool. Just be aware that it’s a little like dragging your fingernails across a chalkboard if you use it in this non-recommended way. I’d like to use this as an example to experiment with any tool that comes your way (with safety in mind) because you never know how much fun you’ll have.

The Japanese Lined Journal that I held up is one of the smaller, 8.5 x 11 inch or so, APICA journals with 100 pages. You can see the cover of it in this image here. It’s the green one on the left that says Notebook. You need to know a couple things: they make a lot of different notebooks with different papers, some of them may or may not work—none of them are art papers so you need to ratchet back the amount of water you use. It isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But the brush pens love this paper because the paper was made to be written on with that type of pen. You see where I’m going with this. Also I started using this smaller one and found that unlike the larger ones (that are almost 9 x 12 inches) this one had thinner paper (even though it looks the same) and some of the pens I love using on it don’t work well in the smaller version.

You can see the “Japanese Lined Paper” category in the list in the left-hand column for lots of pages in these types of journals. Here’s one of my favorite pages using the sepia Pentel ColorBrush (That is actually a dye-based brush pen and the ink is fugitive and watersoluble, remember in the webinar I mentioned that the gray barreled pens have pigment ink in them—so buy based on what your requirements for supplies are, but the sepia pens, even if the images all faded dead away tomorrow, are just too fun not to use. And on the post I’m linking to in this paragraph you’ll see a detail of the image where you can see some of the layering. It really is too fun to avoid using these pens.)

There’s one other thing that book that I showed you. I cased it in. They don’t come with a hard cover. See, last fall I was sitting here and thinking how much I loved them but how I couldn’t carry them about with me because of the cardstock covers and I got up and took one off the shelf and said, “that’s a text block” and so I cased it in. And it has worked great. (I’ve mentioned this in another post, but not in the video and I didn’t want any of you writing to the manufacturer asking for a hardbound version, you’ll have to take care of that yourself.) The good news is that except for the paper being thinner than the larger versions it has worked just great as a hardcover (the signatures are sewn so it’s a fun book now) and I’m sure I’ll case the large ones I have on the supply shelf in before using them. (And I have a couple more large ones on order so I’ll be able to check the paper thickness to see if it’s still thicker than the smaller books or if the paper has undergone a global change—which would be really sad, but that happens. When I get those new books I’ll let you know. This paragraph is basically all “buyer beware,” so you don’t order one of these and wonder why your results are different from what I got in my previous books like this.)

The books on drawing I recommended were:

Cathy Johnson, The Sierra Club Guide to Sketching in Nature, Revised Edition. (Since there is a revised edition it looks as if it’s still available new. It’s a great book on sketching—I think I said it had “drawing” in the title, so I want you to be sure to have this actual title.)

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (I said “mind” on the video, sheesh!) Looks like there is a new “Definitive 4th Edition” so maybe I should check that out myself. Basically I think it’s a great book, especially if you think you can’t draw, and don’t have anyone around to help you.  

The books on color theory I recommended were:

Stephen Quiller, Color Choices.

Stephen Quiller, Painter’s Guide to Color.

You can see a more color theory books I recommend on my page “Color Theory: Related Posts and Recommended Books.”

I mentioned indexing my journals so I can retrieve material from them and you can read about that at this link. (Some images I post on my blog may not have a page number on them because they were scanned before the journal was filled. I don’t number pages until the journal is filled. But I also don’t go back and rescan things!)

I’d also like to clarify that the dead scientists I mentioned sketching portraits of were not depicted as “dead” because that’s sort of the way it sounded. They were all scientists who were deceased before I needed to sketch them and therefore we had to rely on other reference material.

I really believe life drawing is important. If you can’t find a life drawing co-op at a local art school or university, see if you can find one in any “lofts” where artists congregate. We have warehouse buildings in the old parts of both St. Paul and Minneapolis which have been reconfigured to house artist studios and galleries and they all have artist co-ops. If you’re in the Twin Cities you can see a partial list here.

If you live somewhere there are no life-drawing co-ops then think about starting your own. I started to discuss this and then we changed topics. You can get a couple friends together and just agree that one of you will sit (clothed) and read a book or newspaper) while the rest of your sketch. Then take turns posing so everyone gets to draw. It’s doable. If you want to draw do a Tom Sawyer on your friends and make it happen.

Once again I’d like to encourage you to join in and keep a fake journal during International Fake Journal Month. If you go to my blog Official International Fake Journal Blog there are all sorts of tips on how to get started and select a character, medium, make a plan, and basically have a worthwhile experience. I recommend it to you all.

We had such little time to talk about IFJM and fake journaling that I didn’t get to really discuss the wonderful work that Ellen Ward and Anne Bray had agreed to let me share with you. So I recommend that you go to their sites now and poke around and have some fun with what both these extremely talented women are up to. Let them inspire you to think about being someone else for a month—and also remember that you don’t have to post your fake journal. Many people participate each year and write to me to tell me they are doing it but keeping it private. That’s very useful. Do what is going to get those pages generated!

You can visit my channel on YouTube and see lots of flip throughs of various journals, fake and real.

Thanks again for tuning in. I hope you return often to see what Diane Gibbs is doing at Design Recharge because she has made 120 of these webinars and continues (in fact it sounds to me like all the visual journal keepers should turn in next week to hear the calligrapher talk about his daily project). 

And to return to one more point, if you live where the winters are snowy and cold please get out side and sketch. Here are just some of my many snow-pile sketches (and there’s one of Ken Avidor’s in that group too, he got me sketching piles in the first place, though I was always going out in the snow to sketch). There’s always something to sketch outside, just be sensible, bundle up, and know your cold weather risks.

Cultivate your curiosity and interest in sketching the world around you and you’ll find you can’t make yourself stay indoors in the winter (unless of course you’re in Antarctica). Life is too short to spend a good portion of the year inside. Happy sketching.

Links Mentioned in the Talk

I don’t have the Flickr link where my images were posted but when I get it I’ll add it here.

If you want to look through selections from my Daily Dots project you have always been able to click on the column image dedicated to that project, or you can click on this link: Daily Dots.

Journal pieces from around 1996 through 2008 can be found here. (After I started my blog I stopped updating this gallery section. Journal pieces before 1996 haven’t been digitized, I’m more interested in sketching than scanning.)

Official International Fake Journal Blog (Went up in 2009)

My YouTube Channel My journal flip throughs can be found here (both some regular journals and those for IFJM)

Several blog posts were discussed. I recommend that you go to the Pages List in the left-hand column and find a bunch of “compendiums” that I’ve created on different topics. The Color Theory Compendium was discussed and it includes the link to the “Elephant in the Room” post. 

Don’t forget that you can use my blog’s search engine to find things like my palettes.

Twitter  Roz Stendahl @RozStendahl. I don’t tweet much as I indicated in the discussion. You can click on a link at the top of the left-hand column to get to me in Twitter.

I teach in-person bookbinding and journaling at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (I don’t have any classes scheduled for the next few months because of eldercare commitments.) 

My book arts galleries can be seen here.

I have a class in the course “Beginning” at Sketchbook Skool. My class is about drawing animals from life and has lots of tips and the videos show me working. (I’m not sure when it will be offered next—it just wrapped up a run—but you can check in with Sketchbook Skool. “Beginning” includes five other great artists who all bring their perspective and approaches to visual journaling.)

Other places I post blog entries:

UrbanSketchers—TwinCities (a chapter of the parent organization UrbanSketchers)

Artist’s Journal Workshop (Created by Cathy (Kate) Johnson with contributing artists who were in her book with the same title)