April 12 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 12 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

April 12, 2012 9:50 p. 

I live in a no-man's land of food delivery. Yes there are grocery services, and kind friends who stop by with specialty treats like ice cream and cake, and of course too many pizza choices. But the restaurants with the foods I love see 280 as a barrier. For St. Paul restaurants the fact that I'm just west of 280 is a deal breaker. It's as if they are afraid gravity will let go past 280! They will courier food to Woodbury and beyond, miles and miles away. They refuse my closer destination as impossible. And for the Minneapolis restaurants—you'd think they'd include me because I am west of 280. No, I'm too close to 280. So while I am less than two miles from some of them they see it as more feasible to scurry north or south 10 to 20 miles.

Perhaps I can prevail upon Pauly to bring me some Indian food on his next visit.

[Image caption] April 12, 2012 5:30 p. window #4

The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The sky is rendered with gouache.

April 11 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 11 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

April 11, 2012 10 p. 

I tried to meditate today but couldn't get my mind as flat and free as the sky was all day.

I spent two hours pushing hard on the trainer. It's amazing how the miles on the bike mount up, and even though you  are still here you might have been half way across the continent by now, if things were different.

[Image caption] April 11, 2012 1:10 p. All windows! I ran about looking at ll views. It is cloudless. A bit lighter than this dried, and of course minus the inadvertent finger smudge on the left.

The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The sky is rendered with gouache.

A Note from Carol Bonomo

Left: Paper Lunch Bag Avatar of "Roz" created by Carol Bonomo. Click on the image and view the enlargement. (Don't you love how my hair comes up into little horns? I think this is totally me!)

Carol Bonomo participated in past IFJM celebrations but decided since she was traveling for part of April she had better give it a miss this year. (I think that's a wise thing, especially since she was traveling where there would be burros!)

But before she left for her trip she created the manga lunch bag avatar for me, seen at the left. (She'd done this just in case there was going to be another project journal infiltration—that's careful planning of the type I love!)

She was making bags like this with a group of volunteers she'd trained to raise money for her buddhist temple. They finished 60 for the Hanamatsuri festival, which is weekend of April 25, and pre sold $38 worth to proud grandmas who gave them to their grandkids.

The group had so much fun they are already asking Carol what they'll be doing for their next fund raiser.

Left: Carol Bonomo's self-portrait on a lunch bag, part of her manga avatar project. 

Carol was kind enough to send this bag to me, along with the fun one of herself (see the second image in this post). I wanted to share them with you not only because I think they are great, but I think it's a fun idea for fundraising. 

Carol also shared a insight she had gained from previous participation in IFJM with me:

The point to me—which I actually "got" the first year I did IFJM - was not staying captive to a book for visual journaling.  That year I did painted postcards from my character, and it was the first time I didn't do something in a book,  I saved them in an exotic envelope I made for the occasion.  I saw the lunch bags we were making and said, "now THERE'S visual journal potential," so thank you for offering the opportunities to force us to think out of the book!

So often we think about journaling as something we can only do in a book. But not everyone's mind or method follows that pattern and structure. I know people who journal on scraps of paper. I love to make prepainted journal cards and journal on them during trips or special events. Right now I'm doing a memory-composition-drawing everyday on 5 x 7 inch cards and it has become a journal of sorts. I had hoped to do my fake journal on an iPad this year—perhaps next year?

Let your mind expand to journal in anyway that makes sense to you. And what better way to try something out than a project like IFJM or a two or three week intensive? Give it a shot. (And draw burros whenever the opportunity arises.)

Carol posts her artistic pursuits at Painted Photos. I don't see any burros up there yet, but she has promised me that some are coming. Pop over and she what's she is up to. 

April 10 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 10 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

[Two columns of text from a New Yorker article which can be read by clicking on the image to view an enlargement.]

Evan Osnos, "Letter from China: The God of Gamblers—why Vegas is moving to Macau." New Yorker, April 9, 2012 

[Image caption] April 10, 2012 1:49 p. window #10 minus the trees. Lower level not light or green enough with F.U.B.

Note: F.U.B. is French Ultramarine Blue.


The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The pencil used in the drawing is a Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watersoluble Colored Pencil and the sky is rendered with gouache.

April 9 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 9 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

April 9, 2012 10 p.

No life drawing for me tonight. Marta came today to discuss her latest landscapes—tiny precious scribbles of line and block[s] of color. I look forward to seeing how they translate up in scale

She brought a book to cheer me: "Hello Kitty Through the Seasons: Photographs and Haiku," Jennifer Butefish and Maria Fernanda Soares (photos); text by Kate T. Williamson. 

We laughed and laughed over the images and odd haiku. Until this one, accompanying a photo of Hello Kitty in scuba gear face down and soggy in a tidal pool.

Staring politely,I float above a starfishand avoid the sharks.
Words to live by. 

[Image caption] April 9, 2012 6:40 p. window #1 trees not fully leafed out…had to work fast to get fast moving cloud.

The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The pencil used in the drawing is a Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watersoluble Colored Pencil and the sky is rendered with gouache.

April 8 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 8 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

April 8, 2012 8 p.

The wind was strong today but I only saw that with the movement of the branches. I would have loved riding out even in a gale I think. I rode the trainer for two hours. The new television was delivered today. Two young men conversant with all the various auxiliary equipment and cables [came] able to make it all talk to each other. I have caught up on some of my TV viewing and am looking forward to watching the conclusion of "Great Expectations."

[Image caption] April 8, 2012 4:15 p. window #1 Tree heavily edited so I could get the fast moving clouds. The brilliance of the white at the edges on this side of the house was blindingly dazzling.

The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The pencil used in the drawing is a Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watersoluble Colored Pencil and the sky is rendered with gouache.

April 7 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 7 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

I'm beginning to regret letting the cleaners go. It has been sufficient time now where I can see I'm not dusting enough. Everything could use a good mopping. The inconvenience of packing up my projects on cleaning day so they could work around things might actually have been less trouble. I need to set a schedule and then just do it—like exercise. But the new people in Judy's crew weren't as thorough so I really would rather do it myself. Start now.

[Image caption] April 7, 2012 6:15 p. window #4. Raining all day and then these fast-moving clouds…for awhile I had the perfect "mud on my palette but ran out—no time to get more paint. The grey of the cloud top left.

The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The pencil used in the drawing is a Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watersoluble Colored Pencil and the sky is rendered with gouache.

April 6 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 6 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

Transcript:

Being a mentor sometimes sucks. You want to be your normal sarcastic self—that self who is so popular at dinner parties. But as a mentor you are responsible as the last wall of defense for the spirit of another. You have to hold the snippy part of yourself in check and allow the protege to decide when it's time to fully take down the wall.

Kelsy dropped by for her tutorial this morning. All was fine until she started talking about Rembrandt and light. "He starts with the darks," she exclaimed, breathless, launching into an argument that totally explains the flatness in value of her thumbnail sketches. 

Slowly, patiently I showed her, with the help of his glorious etchings, how Rembrandt starts with the light and builds his darks around them reverently, ecstatically. He holds on to the light. And now she has a week's assignment to do the same.

[Image caption] April 6, 2012 4 p. window #15 The sky was more cobalt but the paint didn't wat to blend.

The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The pencil used in the drawing is a Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watersoluble Colored Pencil and the sky is rendered with gouache.

April 5 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal—And Distancing Yourself from Your Character

Above: April 5 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

This is the April 5 entry in my 2012 fake journal. A transcript of the text follows. The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy Fountain Pen. The pencil used in the drawing is a Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watersoluble Colored Pencil and the sky is rendered with gouache.

Transcript:

>Edward Dolwich, "The Forger's Spell."

So primed are we to see what we want to see (and to reject what runs counter to our hopes and expectations) that psychologists and economists have coined an entire vocabulary to describe the ways we mislead ourselves. "Confirmation bias" is the broad heading. The idea is that we tell ourselves we are making decisions based on the evidence, though in fact we skew the results by grabbing up welcome news without a second glance while subjecting unpleasant facts to endless testing. 

This form of self-deception pops up in the most ordinary circumstances and in the most momentous. When the number on our bathroom scale is the one we hoped to see, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert points out, we happily hurry off to get dressed. When it brings dismaying news, we step off and try again; we dry off even more thoroughly; we see if perhaps we can do better by standing at a different spot on the scale. On the battlefield, generals respond to good news and bad news in much the same way. (p. 224-226, Harper Perennial 2008)

[Image caption] April 5, 2012 1:55 p. window #12 outside the door looking southeast. 

Today I'd also like to make a little point about distancing yourself from your character. I've written about this before in tips, but it occurred to me that I didn't point out what was going on in regards to handwriting in this year's journal.

I always try to write in a way that is somewhat different from my regular handwriting. I find that this slows my brain down just a bit and allows me to stay in character more easily.

Sometimes I do this by writing with a tool I'm might sketch with but don't write with (dip pen in 2009 for instance) and I will force myself to speed up—and write in a messier fashion if it's appropriate for the character or the character's situation.

This year I chose to write with a Preppy Fountain Pen and since I use them a lot in my regular life I experimented with different ways to write with one before I started my fake journal on April 1.

I printed neatly, wrote big circling, loopy letters, and even tried a backward slopping script. What worked for me was to use my regular cursive handwriting, slow down the pace, minimize the x-height and stretch out the letters. That's not how I would normally write. It feels "right" for this character because it is readable after a fashion, small and detailed. I do have to keep reminding myself to slow down and write deliberately!

If you are having trouble getting into your character's mind consider the handwriting. We are all very individual in our handwriting styles.

What if your character suffered an injury and had to write with his or her non-dominant hand?

There are lots of ways you can go.

April 4 in Roz's 2012 Fake Journal

Above: April 4 in the 2012 fake Journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement. Read below for details.

This is the April 4 entry in my 2012 fake journal. A transcript of the text follows. The journal is a 7 x 10 inch handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. The pen used is a Preppy fountain pen. The sky is rendered with gouache.

Transcript:

I could live in a sea of sarcasm, but today I'll focus on a different route. Pragmatic. After three weeks I'm still having trouble remembering which window. I'm tired of mentally recounting and second guessing. This chart resolves that. Despite what others think boundaries matter to me. Now I am being sarcastic.

[Image caption] April 4, 2012 1:30 p. window #2 looking over the roofs.