The Importance of Keeping a Notebook

If there is one thing I have come to understand in my many years of art schooling, it's that notebooks are pretty important. Full of sketches, doodles, words, etc., they hold all your ideas and dreams in a nice little bound package. Which is both cute and good for helping you communicate and work through your ideas.

In all honesty, I struggled with notebooks for a long time. This struggle can be traced back to 2 things. 1.) Each class had so many requirements as to what had to be in the notebook that often times keeping a notebook felt like a chore. A chore that was really easy to get behind on and then slap something together right before the due date. 2.) The perfectionist in me was afraid of messing up, of not creating a book that flowed from one page to the next and told a beautiful story. It wasn't until my senior portfolio class that I really understood how I functioned in the realm of notebooks. Because in that year long class, we were only told to keep a notebook. No requirements. No guidelines. No rules. My notebook for that class actually ended up being mostly words. Which is very appropriate because at the time I was having a lot of conceptual ideas and trying to plan out my future... and also I am one of those people who makes lists.

The notebook I kept this summer during my internship at Lilly turned out almost completely opposite from my senior year notebook. Which is crazy interesting when I think about the type of work I was doing and my state of mind during those two different periods. And well... I'd like to share a few pages with you.