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Sample Art Journal Page

Nov 2006

People often ask me where I get my original art ideas. Well, I'm not sure that they're entirely "original," but they are fresh and new, if only to me.

Here's a typical sequence: I started by surfing the Internet to see what other artists are currently working on. (I've been posting my favorite links at my Aisling.net blog.)

Yesterday, I viewed a website called The Starving Artist's Way, which included a project using second-hand woolen sweaters that had been washed and dried to shrink them in a "felted" style.

I didn't think much more about that--not on a conscious level, anyway--but later in the day, after a nap, I woke up thinking about what else I could do with that kind of wool.

While the thoughts were still fresh in my mind--and evolving--I jotted them down in my art journal. These are my two pages of notes:

(click image to see full size 118kb)

In a nutshell, I was thinking about the kinds of wearable art that I could make with felted-style wool. (Geek note: It's not actually "felted" wool when you wash & dry woven/knitted/etc. wool to shrink it. It's called "fulled" wool. Felting is when you use the raw fibers and a tool to tangle and/or compact them.)

This merged with the Mondrian art that I was reminded of when I was playing an online game, Kingdom of Loathing, yesterday.

And, once I started jotting down these ideas, I remembered when I used to make stained glass windows. Those patterns would adapt nicely to this kind of wool treatment, too.

I'm not sure that I'll ever actually do anything with this idea. I get a bazillion of these ideas, steadily.

So, I'm scanning the pages from my idea journal, and putting them into an art zine for two reasons. (The zine will be online, by the way.)

First, it documents that it was my idea. It drives me crazy when I decide to run with an idea and it turns out that another artist has been working on a similar concept... and people think that one of us is "copying" the other, when we're not.

Second--and more importantly--I am sharing this idea so that someone else might be inspired by it and adapt the concepts (or copy it line-for-line, for all I know/care) to his or her own art.

When my grandfather's original ideas were copied, he used to chuckle and say, "Plenty more where that came from." In other words, he didn't feel any need to complain about those who copied him. I've always liked that, and he was the richest man I knew, when I was growing up. He literally made millions (when that was a lot of money) from his creative ideas; he was a good role model.

But, I'm also sharing my art journal pages so that people can see what an actual art journal can look like. (As opposed to an artist's journal, which is often an illustrated daily diary.)

Did you know...

I'm a third-generation artist, so I have always created art. I mean, the supplies were always all around me. It was natural to play with them!

In the early 1980s, I realized that it might be a good idea to jot down some of the creative ideas that fly through my brain. So, I began carrying a small notebook and wrote down ideas, on-the-fly.

Around the mid-1980s, I stopped maintaining that journal, but recently started again with a fresh little blank journal.

I believe that the act of keeping this kind of art journal actually helps spark even more, creative ideas.

Sort-of (but not exactly) Related Reading

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