Designing on the Fly

Designing on the Fly is the Sketchbook Design lesson that trips me up every year. I finally realized why: It wants many different objectives. First, sketch a whole series. The suggestion is to go out for a day, and I struggle with that. Second, design on the fly, as you go, with little planning. What happens if you need a little planning to even know where to go, or what to draw while there? Third, utilize some of the design elements like balance, and repetition. Now go fill a whole series of pages, and make them look like part of a whole book with flow and variety! That’s all!

Then I got sick for a week and a half, and the time I had for the lesson vanished. So I had to rescale my plan to what I could do with my virus, and my at-home sketching. (I’m still fending off this virus, as I write this. I tested for Covid, and Flu A & B, and it’s neither, fortunately. Shall I add that note as a little orange flag to the sketchbook page?)

My through-line was paper notes. I’ve been doing these hand-drawn weather cards for a while now. Little sketched pages, slightly curled and shadowed, turning up on every spread. I can’t resist tracking the absurdity of “autumn” in Scottsdale. It was 93° on October 20th. With thunderstorms! Very spooky season.

Orange. The first spread is my fall forest. I wanted to use the Warm/Cool theme, so my background is warm autumn colors, then I stenciled the cool dark trunks over the wash, plus squirrels, falling leaves and a hedgehog who wandered in. The weather notes tumble down the left side and pick up again on the right, and yes, there’s a sticker. I voted!

Brown. I had to include my planning page. It’s been the defining theme of my run of Sketchbook Design this year. I’ve loved these planning pages so much. This page is dark and cozy, partly because I’d made an inking error on the borders and so the dark background became how to hide that error! Weather notes march across the top, instead of the small calendar insert I used on the previous planning pages. I gave each one an orange tab with that day’s plan. It started out ambitious: Write Witch’s Apothecary. Site Q. Blog post. Finish Witch’s Apothecary (I did!). Then it turns into something more like a medical chart: toe injury. ugh. Sick! The lesson checklist went in the middle, and the empty space underneath got a witchy broom and a pile of gourds, since the gourds were very patiently sitting there. At least I got some of the seasonal flavor in my spread!

Yellow. The last spread is Site Q, Episode 2. I kept up the yellow lined-paper trompe l’oeil from my Box 1 pages, so the whole thing connects back to earlier in the book. I solved both the telegraph cipher and the Maya number cipher, which was so much fun, and I found an escaped officer, a body in a latrine (eww) and a possible love triangle. Also, I lost my Apple Pencil. But I found it a couple days later. I do love documenting life as it happens!

For this series, I was thinking that the notes repeat, the color drifts from orange to brown to yellow, and each spread has one dark, heavy element anchoring it: the tree trunks, the brown band, the cipher strip. None of that was planned, I drew one thing, and then the next. I adjusted my error with a heavy color, and so on. Very On the Fly!

Though the real series that seems to be emerging are these Site Q pages. There is a distinct through-line for these, that I’m absolutely loving. I have twelve boxes, so what a series this will be when it’s all done!