I am starting to get some glimpses of non-chaos in my thinking about my book. I know that the most important thing is that I am qualified to write this book so I have credibility as an author. I think I have credibility to do the memoir, but not yet for the art side of it. So I am going to spend at least a month doing exercise after exercise in my art books. I ordered 12 sheets of Fabriano Artistico 140lb hot press paper, so I can make 12 of Teesha Moore’s amazing 16 page journal, and I want to fill every page of those journals with my experimentation. If I basically do a binge of filling journals with everything from hand carved rubber stamp alphabets to color mixing charts to comics, I’d have a record of what I do well and what needs work if I want to include anything like it in my book. I’m not talking about going through every art book I have and doing every lesson or project in them, but rather taking the stuff that already interests me and putting it together in some kind of scientific-study-verifiable-kind-of-way. I would definitely have to make all the journals at once and just start at page one and end at page, well, what’s 12×16? That’s kind of a generous number though because there are fold-out half pages in the journals.

So, when the paper comes I am going pretty much offline until I am finished with this project. I just bought a new digital camera that has very true color, so I will practice taking photos of the work (which is itself one of my weaknesses) and post it here, but that will be it as far as unnecessary internet use. I recall with great fondness my month offline last September.