(For my journal I used a Moleskin - a blank 5"x8" cashier notebook)
Last month I participated in Roz Stendahl's International Fake Journal Month. She devised this as an opportunity to keep a journal as a persona, allowing one to explore what journal keeping would mean to a different person in different circumstances. She suggests, for example, taking this an opportunity to break from your usual medium or subject matter or format size. She explains all this much better on her website for IFJM.
I wanted to participate since I heard about it last year right at the end of the month. I thought about trying it out on my own during the last year, but never left I had the right circumstances to sustain it on my own. So I was really excited when April 1st finally rolled around. My objectives for the month were pretty simple. Draw as much as possible without being fanatical. Stick to one subject as much as possible, without being fanatical. Try to be consistent with my character while serving my own life circumstances, in other words, try not to be fanatical about the character. Why all this emphasis on not being fanatical? This is the kind of project that I would really love to throw myself into. This is the kind of project that I have, at other times in my life,completely thrown myself into. But moderation is the name of the game for me right now, and I needed to really remind myself of that to keep my expectations in check. I wanted to feel successful about my participation because I want it to feed my general visual journaling which has been very helpful to me in my life.
And in fact I do feel very successful about the whole experience. I carried my journal with me almost all the time. I found there were many small and long moments when I could happily sketch in keeping with my character. Being able to do this served the double purpose of keeping the momentum of IFJM going, but to a greater extent, it helped me handle some tedious and anxious moments by allowing me to refocus my attention on my surroundings (rather than my worries) and brought me into myself physically and mentally.
My charactor was named Carrie and she worked as a waitress in a diner. She was being encouraged to keep a sketchbook by her sister-in-law, Carrie, and she kept a blog where she posted the sketchbook pages for Carrie to see. She was a little hard of hearing so she was uncomfortable using the phone. This also meant that when she went to some places, she felt isolated and so used sketching as a way to connect herself with what was going on around her because conversation in large crowds was difficult (too much ambient noise). Originally I had intended to sketch in the diner where I meet with my friends. But circumstances fell out that this month we actually didn't meet very often.
After the first week I realized that keeping the blog was a little too much as I was trying to get into the journal, so I gave Carrie a week of vacation during which she didn't have access to the scanner at her work. That gave me a chance to really just focus on the journaling and get a backlog of pages while I was still getting in the rhythem of regular scanning/downloading/editing and posting (I'm still a relative newbie to all this bloggie stuff).
One aspect of her journal that I enjoyed the most was treating it as a sketch class. I focused mostly on people and I tried to think of them as models. Sometimes I was able to work in a little more detail.. Sometimes it was a 30 sec sketch. Often I had no idea how long I would have and so just started with what caught my eye and then kept going until - ding - they moved or shifted or I had to leave.
I had no idea how much I enjoyed sketching ponytails. I found myself scanning crowds for ponytailed girls. The second surprising aspect was I started to put details into people's faces. I have avoided that this alast year because mostly I get disgusted with my wobbly hand and how careful faces need to be rendered. But I started to feel like I could risk a little nose action or chin placement. This might be just incremental change, but it's change for me, and I like where it's going.
I'm going to have to think more about the fake journal aspect of this challenge and how I might better utilize it next time. Having done it once, I have a better idea of where my resistance points were, and I need to think about those more. I'm intriqued by the parts I found difficult, and that gives me plenty to ponder for next time.
I've put a fresh journal into my bag. I don't plan to do it in charactor and I'm changing the pen, but I do plan to continue to take advantage of as many of those moments as I can. I could feel the improvement in how much I trusted my hand to capture what I wanted, and for me that is a big big deal. I will probably continue with people for this journal. With the pen switch, I will have enough of a challenge to keep things fresh and inviting.
Of course, the next best part of IFJM is looking at other people's fake journals. I felt my fakeness was pretty boring compared to others (which is fine since it served my purposes) so it was really a blast to see how creative people got. Thanks to all the other contributors and those who shared theirs on the blog. It was a pleasure even if I didn't leave comments. I hope to see all of you and many more next year.
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