Doodles and a Moleskine in Review... Kinda

After nearly two years, my first Moleskine notebook is finally complete. I think this is perhaps the second time I've finished a blank book in my entire life, and though this was a tiny notebook, I'm going to give it credit anyway! Flipping through the pages, I enjoyed seeing how the book evolved. It started out more as a journal and notebook. I was keeping a lot of ideas from things happening around my deskjob at the time.... oddly enough, I felt there were fascinating things to write about as an insurance claim adjustor in the worker's compensation industry.

In hindsight, a lot of it was my desperate attempt to get through the day by finding humor in even the most mundane situations. I was also reading a lot of J.D. Salinger and Catch-22 at the time, so I tried to come up with my own witty observations (and run-on sentences) in everyday occurrences. One line that sticks out to me was my take on writer's block, though it was actually in reference to my own block as an artist who had essentially been out of the loop for three years:

He was a struggling writer who never struggled over what to write, but to actually sit and write about his struggles. He didn't write about them because he knew the effort would indicate he had enough energy to do something about it. He didn't do something about it because he spent all his energy contemplating how to write about it. So he sat instead. And he stared. He sat at his desk and stared blankly at his monitor as it stared back in its malignant cathode ray gaze, piercing the sheer layers of moisture in his eyes that gave up long ago, seeping through the tired brittle nerves, shocked and unaffected by the searing sensation of the utmost indifference.

Other times, I was filled with plain, outright desperation without the longwinded prose, as evidenced by several slips of adding machine paper taped inside my notebook, tallying up the bare minimum I needed to make per month if I wanted to leave my job. Around the time I started painting again, there were more doodles. One of the first doodles was this cheery self-portrait:
There were also quoted passages out of a book I was reading at the time, The Fountainhead, which fueled my restlessness as well as my eventual decision to leave. About twenty pages into the book, I gained a more optimistic perspective on things. There's a line I wrote on the day I put in my two week notice of resignation that says,"And suddenly, time slowed down again." I started sketching more ideas. There were also diagrams, plot maps, and bulletpoints outlining my plan of action to get my illustration career going. It's nice to look back and see some of those items crossed off!

The bulk of the book from that point on documents various road trips I've been on, doodles or ideas for large projects I jotted down.... for instance, on my largest project, there is a page of various ring designs I came up with when I decided I was going to propose to Alex - another story for another time.

Anyway, my attention span is slipping fast, and so I'm pretty sure yours is too. To make a short story long, I'd like to share a page of doodles out of the old book, as well as a couple from the new book:

I wish I could go into explaining the various degrees of style or subjects, and where I plan on taking some of these sketches, but I've honestly worn myself out.... I guess it's a good thing I chose to be a starving artist rather than a struggling writer.