This week, I had a bunch of baking to do. When I finally had the time to sit down at my art desk, I wanted to jump back into my projects, but I didn't know where to start. I have some tricks that I use - organizing papers, making eyeballs, going through the scrap pile - but none of those appealed to me. That's when I flipped back through my current sketchbook and saw a couple of unfinished pages. One of them was about how to start, and that seemed like a perfect place to begin.
I realized that working in my sketchbooks feel like sitting down for tea with an old friend. At first, it's a little awkward, catching up on surface matters, getting used to each other again. Then, you find a groove and find that you can talk like you always could, dive back down into the deep things that really matter. I began tentatively at first but it didn't take long to find myself wholeheartedly ripping and gluing, adding marks and color. I started feeling like, hey, I can do this again. Where's that unfinished project? I'm ready to work on it.