notebooks – Page 7

Open every day of the week

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

The art of contextomy: you cut some words off a pizza box, tape them to the cover of your diary, and they become an imperative. A commandment!

Speaking of diaries, the 5-year-old’s diary is becoming way cooler than mine:

A follower on Instagram asked me how they should get their kid to keep a diary. I think in most situations, the most important thing is to model for your kids what you’d like them to do, first. Owen sees me cutting things up and glueing them into my diary every morning, and he always wants to look at my notebook, so one day I (as casually as possible) asked him if he’d like his own special notebook to keep a diary in. That’s how he got started. So: model, see if there’s interest, and then offer up the time, space, and materials.

Inspiring diaries

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

I’m devouring Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies right now. My only gripe with the book is you don’t get a sense for how wonderfully visual his notebooks were.

More inspiration came this morning, courtesy of my 5-year-old’s diary. (Everything on that page after the words “as usual” is invented.)

I keep a huge file of inspiring notebooks on my tumblr, which I relied on when making The Steal Like An Artist Journal. Here’s a slideshow talk I gave a few years back with some of the highlights:

Notebook vs. washing machine

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

I was searching for some earbuds and found this notebook in my walking fleece that I haven’t used for months now, sadly, as we have entered the hell season in Texas.

It was my “scratch” notebook, the one I carry around all day, scribbling notes that I then either copy into my logbook or my diary, so it wasn’t that great of a catastrophe.

One interesting thing: I used two different pens and a pencil for these notes, and the water washed out all the felt-tip Flair pen (I didn’t realize they use water-based ink!), but the Pilot G2 ink and the Blackwing pencil remained mostly intact. So now I have this weird object in which some things are erased, some things survive.

Usually with notebooks what survives is the quality of the idea — in this case, it was about the quality of writing tool!

15% completed

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

One of my favorite little Twitter bots is @year_progress, which tweets every 3.65 days when 1% of the year goes by:

I have my own analog version on the edges of my page-a-day logbook. One of the first things I do at the beginning of the year is make a little index system for the months. I like having another visual of how the year is progressing. (Here’s the notebook I use, and a similar index system.)

Notebook Turducken

Monday, February 19, 2018

I posted this image on Instagram, quickly, mindlessly, simply because the stack caught my eye as I passed the kitchen table and I thought it was a pleasing image. (A commenter cleverly titled it “Notebook Turducken.”)

This morning I looked and it had several thousand hearts and dozens of comments, many of them questions about my process and what brand of notebook I use. I’ve written about this subject several times, but, as Andre Gide said, nobody was listening, so I guess I’ll say it again. Questions all from Instagram commenters:

What brand of notebook do you use?
~~Who the hell cares? Just kidding. The top two notebooks are Moleskines, an~~ ~~extra-small~~ ~~pocket one, and a~~ ~~daily planner~~. The bottom notebook, the one I use as my diary and sketchbook, is a brand I cannot recommend because they’re unreliable and I’ve had several fall apart on me, but I bought them in bulk, so I use them. The closest thing I could recommend is ~~a flexible Miquelrius~~. Here’s a storefront with all the stuff I use.

How do you use them differently and how are they linked together? Do you migrate entries from one to the other?
I carry the pocket notebook all day, scribble stuff in it, take notes. It’s basically a scratch pad. Then, every morning after breakfast, I open up the pocket notebook, check my notes, then I fill out my logbook, which is sort of like an index of my days and a memory refresher. Then, I write and draw 3-10 pages in my diary, based on my notes and my log. I cross off things in my pocket notebook after I write about them. The diary then becomes a place I go to when I need new writing and blog posts. It might sound like a lot of work, but using this method I am never lost for something to write about. Also, my job is to write, so, there you have it. (By the way, I stole most of this method off David Sedaris.)

You need a bullet journal so you can combine everything into one.
Oh my lord shut up about bullet journaling already!