notebookism

Blank Page # 28

Every Wednesday at Notebookism we open a "Blank Page" -  your chance to ask, answer and discuss anything notebook-related.  Keep it nice, keep it relevant.

Blank Page, an Open Thread.

Living Out Loud

Remember those childhood days spent running in your bare feet, playing make-believe, and most of all, living life with wonderment? That youthful enthusiasm and playfulness are key to discovering who you are and what you love to do. Living Out Loud is the perfect prescription for a creative jump start to your life. Included are games, projects, activities, crafts, postcards, and playful ideas that will send you off on an exciting adventure, where you'll discover inspiration around and within you.

Living Out Loud
By Keri Smith

Visit her blog, "The Wish Jar"
Book link

Tips on keeping a journal

Although I do not write in a journal regularily, I am a huge believer in journal writing on journeys. They are a way of capturing the thoughts, feelings and moments of the trip - many that you will surprisingly forget about otherwise.

  I bought my first journal in Paris, France - but I did not expect to use it as a journal. I bought the book so I could keep track of what places I went to, transportation I took, people I met, etc. It wasn't very much - maybe a page or two of notes per day.

  But in a period of a few days, my scribbles became sentences, my lists became paragraphs. Pretty soon, I couldn't stop writing. Rather than start each entry with just the date, I included the time as well. I was completely addicted.

  The objective of making a journal is to capture the physical, mental and spiritual details of your travels. A journal can be an extension to your memory or a way of sparking your memory... or both. Even a few weeks after my trips, I flip to a random page in my journal and revisit the adventure I took. Although I can remember vividly many aspects of my trip, my journal fills in the blanks to what I have forgotten by using the stimuli of words, drawings, and objects.

Kolby Kirk

Read the full artcle at his blog
View his photos on FLICKR

Visual Journaling with Celebrity Artist Michael Bell

Visual Journaling with Celebrity Artist Michael Bell

YouTube
View Part 1 and Part 2

Inspiration: I Am Plastic

The (variously) one-eyed, one-horned, purple, red and green people eaters called Uglydolls are among the most successful of a new wave of vinyl, plastic and plush “designer toys.” Originally conceived by the New York design school graduates David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, the Uglydoll line has grown into a monstrous franchise with dozens of iterations, collected (ostensibly for their kids) by baby boomers, like me, who have yet to fully embrace maturity. Uglydolls are, however, but one brand among scores — if not hundreds — of patently quirky and deliberately unsightly toy/object characters that have exploded into a minor global phenomenon.

Starting in Hong Kong and Japan during the mid-1990s, when comic illustrators fiendishly began tearing off and substituting heads and appendages on G.I. Joes, Barbies and other mainstream dolls and toys with mangled (and melted) body parts, these hybrids were sold at comic-book conventions, where people went wild for them. Soon toy factories in Guangdong Province in China were commissioned to produce limited editions of around 250 each, and the “designer toy movement” erupted.

Toy Story
By STEVEN HELLER
The New York Times
Published January 28, 2007

LINK Registration required]

I AM PLASTIC
The Designer Toy Explosion.
By Paul Budnitz.
Illustrated. 367 pp. Harry N. Abrams. $40.

Prayer of a Writer

Lord of all things, whose wondrous gifts to man include the shining symbols known as words, grant that I may use their mighty power only for good.

Help me to pass on small fragments of your wisdom, truth and love. Teach me to touch the unseen, lonely heart with laughter, or the quick release of tears.

Let me portray the courage that endures, defiant in the face of pain or death; the kindness and gentleness of those who fight against the anger of the world; the beauty hidden in the smallest things; the mystery, the wonder of it all . . .

Open my ears, my eyes; unlock my heart. Speak through me, Lord, if it be your will.

Amen.

By Bob Garon
ABS-CBN
Link

Image: Sunkisland @ Notebookism/FLICKR
 

One Ring (in Four Sizes) to Bind Them

Six months ago, I completed the transition of my work-related project and administrative paper files over to a system that uses Rollabind discs as its (literal) backbone. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. Rollabind and Circa products have notably improved my file storage, retrieval, and transfer processes, note-taking, and task management. They’ve even inspired some useful hacks that I will cover in detail in future entries.

Rollabind even wooed me away from legal pads, which had been my constant companions since college. Amazing.

Paul Lagasse
Visit his new blog, "Active Voice"

The Drawings of the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez

Ramírez, who created the roughly 300 drawings that make up his known work between 1948 and 1963 while confined to a mental hospital in Northern California, is simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He belongs to the group of accessible, irresistible genius draftsmen that includes Paul Klee, Saul Steinberg and Charles Schulz. Well selected and beautifully installed by Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the folk art museum, this show of 97 drawings, some mural-size, is the first museum exhibition of Ramírez’s work in New York and one of the best shows of the season.

Whatever ideas about art you hold dear, expect them to be healthily destabilized here. If a purely visual, white-cube experience of the autonomous art object is your thing, you may be startled by the illuminating correlations between the artist’s newly excavated biography and his pulsating images.

If you think art is anything but autonomous and that, rather than speaking for itself, it mainly says what we want it to say, then you must deal with the way these works made enough noise to survive against almost impossible odds.

"Outside In"
The Drawings of drawings of the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez
By Roberta Smith
The New York Times

LINK [Registration required]

Alife Sketchbooks

ALIFE SKETCHBOOKS

Alife Designs

[via NOTCOT]

Notebook Roundup

I bought this notebook last summer in HK. On the cover it says: Cover Note
N 1432 B6 96 sheets
MARUMAN
On the back it says made in Japan.
Does anybody know if these notebooks are available in Europe as well?

bebamanno @ Notebookism/FLICKR

Rollbahn Notebooks

starfield @ Notebookism/FLICKR

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Enjoy your weekend. We'll see you on Monday.