Cathy Sutton on Her 2015 Fake Journal

Image ©2015 Cathy Sutton; from "Mabel's Adventures in Estheenian."

This was Cathy Sutton's first year participating. Her character Mabel's journal can be seen in its entirety at this link. She departed from the guidelines of the project towards the end, but in doing so she reached another personal goal. Creativity will do that for us.

Here's what Cathy wrote about Mabel's Adventures in Estheenian:

First off I totally enjoyed this project.
I learned some very helpful things while writing about Mable and the Estheenians , and some surprising things about myself. 

Rather than babbling on about it, I'm going to list those things in point form.
My bet is many others learned the same lessons and also had some gob-smacking realizations. 

* the most surprising thing I learned was during the last week, I realized that I was overwhelmingly affected by Mable. When I was writing and drawing her confusion to how she felt when the realization came that she probably wouldn't see her Estheenian family again, I had a lump in my throat the size of a cantaloupe. I didn't cry- but I could have. 

*i found it a great experience to look at life through the eyes of a precocious 7 yr old. I thought about a lot of 7 year olds I remembered and how they thought. They cut straight to the chase. They look at a situation and make a straight forward decision. Too young for biases and prejudices. As Kerash said,"pure."

* there was so much more to say, but one entry isn't enough to say it all. I wanted to talk about language—surely Mabel picked up some Estheenian, and surely the kids (Taj and Feen) picked up some English like yes, no, hi, Mum.
No time. 

*i loved solving the problems I created—like washing and cleaning, no water, light emitting showers that clean everything.of course they won't work, but it's hard to question a society the creates nutritional pills, but also has a food simulator. (I was going to have Taj make bushels of m+m,s.) there were so many I ran into, that I had to invent something to overcome my problem. (Jet cart for instance, or the possibility of Fayjec, Feen, and Taj meeting her family. My god that would have caused days of problems. So thinking ahead was a big issue. 

SOME OF THE PROBLEMS I had with the project: 

* my art was not so hot. Some of the pictures were tiny and my pens and eyesight let me down. Lol. 

* the printing with my non dominant hand was a time consuming problem. 

*it took way way longer each day than I thought it would. 

*stretching started in the 2nd (I think) week of April. I was buried in art trying to juggle it all (whine) as well as my jewelry business. 

* I got behind and panicked. 

* I caught up and felt guilty because at the end I was doing a couple a day. At the beginning, I only wrote at the end of the day when real journaling would occur—after you've gone through the day. 

I've never written anything before and coming up with story, then illustrating it was a treat. I will do it again, but give myself a break and not register for a class at the same time.