Sunday, January 9, 2011

My life as a scrapbooker

I'm learning a hard lesson about being a perfectionist. I’m one of those people who likes to have a grand plan, seeing everything stretched far out in front of them. Don’t get me wrong, I also like an element of spontaneity - but only if I’ve scheduled it.

This mindset has tripped me up at times when approaching the All Before Thirty project. Like the scrapbooking, for example. My ideal scenario involves dabbling in art direction – storyboarding, page setting, planning exactly what is going to go where – but when I couldn’t do that, due to not knowing what resources I’d be able to use, I kind of idled on it. There have been small, preparatory steps, at least, but it is strangely reminiscent of my early high school art class. “Don’t just keep drawing over the same lines,” Mrs Hardinge would scold, “Move onto something else. Finish the artwork.” (It was a picture of a leopard in a tree, by the way. Turned out ok I think.)

It's more important just to get things done and keep the ball rolling, even if it is in a less than perfect capacity. Hence I bought a little book and some coloured paper and starting randomly cutting and gluing. There is no grand plan, I don’t know how many pages I’ll need to allocate, and who needs a theme anyway? This is another one of those unexpected lessons I clearly needed to learn. ... It’s not really about scrapbooking at all, is it?

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