Brief
Keep your sketchbook or notebook with you for a normal day. Of course, everybody’s normal day is different, and it is this unique experience that this exercise can document.
Make written notes and sketch or doodle events that happen to you, things, people you know say or do, and ideas and images that occur to you, maybe while you’re daydreaming or actually dreaming. Try to keep the narrative spontaneous and allow your random thoughts, ideas and feelings to drive and direct the narrative.
The aim of the exercise is to produce an outcome as authentically close to your everyday, lived experience as possible. Try to enjoy the process, and see what happens from randomly generating written and visual material.
Once you have amassed some writing and images, try to organise them into a one-page ‘narrative’. This may not make sense to anyone but yourself, but the important thing is to see what happens when you don’t overthink or overplan a creative process. Think of the page as a semi-organised doodle and have some fun.
I decided to take this exercise as an opportunity to just relax a little and doodle. I had no problem recalling and sketching out examples of my day-to-day (non) existence in admin. I probably could have filled an entire sketchbook! I made the initial sketches with a pencil and then went over these with a fineliner.
I found it very therapeutic and enjoyed attempting to make tongue-in-cheek doodles. Most of it might not make much sense to other people, but I had a great time doing it. I had been putting so much effort and thought into the previous exercises that it was nice to just go with the flow and use my imagination freely.
In terms of the brief, I did not really manage to compile the drawings/words into a particular order, partly because I had drawn them all so close together, but mainly because they were not chronological in nature. I did try to redraw the sketches on a new sheet of paper, so I could spread them out, but felt these lost the spontaneity of the originals.
It does look rather messy and if I had the opportunity to do it again I would have planned out the positioning of each little drawing (so perhaps I could rearrange them digitally) and filled the space better. I also would have made the writing neater or added this digitally.
The drawings can be seen below.
