Quieting the Inner Critic

April was International Fake Journal Month (brain child of Roz Stendahl, a Twin Cities based artist and graphic designer). As I understand it the idea is to do something different. If you draw dogs all the time, draw cats. The project could also be as elaborate as a visual journal written and drawn from a character’s point of view.

For my Fake Journal, I took a few weeks to decide what I was going to do. I usually gravitate toward organic things. I’ve always liked spacescapes but never really attempted any. I have been amazed and delighted at what people come up with for space craft. As for media, I wanted to get better at handling gouache and I wanted to experiment with some Golden brand acrylic mediums. Other ideas were tempting but eventually I picked one.

My plan became spacescapes, inventing spacecraft (machinery which is opposite of my organic leanings), monkeying with some mediums, and painting in gouache. A nice mix of something somewhat familiar, gouache, plus three other elements that were unfamiliar. Make that four. To make pictures unlike my usual gouache mark making, I bought some flat brushes.

Why do all this? My inner critic needed to be taken down a few notches. I wanted to train my inner critic. I wanted to quiet it down and let it pitch in ideas instead of drive the bus.

Originally the idea was to make the inner critic shut up. After reading Chris Oatley’s blog post about Karaoke and Your Inner Critic I changed direction a little from tamping the critic down to working with it. With four unfamiliar elements, spacescapes and spaceships being unfamiliar territory, the inner critic wasn’t a know-it-all. It didn’t try to tell me how things “should” be drawn. Instead the inner critic was allowed to give some aesthetic opinions (composition, values, colors, and it piped up a little when I was designing space craft). It also tried to tell me that the nebulae were “wrong” but I decided to ignore that input. My goal wasn’t to reproduce NASA photos star for star. My goal was to invent, explore, and just plain see what happened. Plus because it was unfamiliar territory, there weren’t many rules I felt I had to follow. The journal became my playground.

I also tried to set expectations before I began work (per Roz’s advice). I worked in my journal 15-30 minutes a day, giving myself time off on weekends. Or using weekends to catch up if I missed a week day. I also gave myself permission to work on a page a second session if the page was getting detailed or turned into a 2-page picture.

The one thing that threw me off at the end was the number of pages I actually used. I thought I would fill most of the book but I didn’t (I didn’t count all the pages and days ahead of time and I made several 2-page spreads). Next time I will define the number of pages I will be able to cover and whether they will be 2-page spreads or single pages. Now that I’ve done it once, I’ll be better able to gauge how much time I will need.

The inner critic is still a bit noisy for certain projects but less than it was before. I highly recommend taking on a Fake Journal project for anyone with a loud, and pushy, inner critic.

More information on International Fake Journal Month can be found on the official blog http://officialinternationalfakejournalblog.blogspot.com/

Note: I have not included images of my Golden Acrylic Medium page experiments. I didn’t want to scuff my scanner glass.

The sketchbook I used was a hard cover 5.5″x8.5″ Delta Series Extra Heavy Weight Paper book from Stillman & Birn. I chose it to withstand my predicted heavy use of gouache and the various acrylic mediums I wanted to play with. The paper and book have stood up to the heavy use beautifully, although it’s a little difficult to close now that I’ve thickened some of the pages with various medium.