On vanity and productivity
Something I’ve slowly realised about myself is that I find it hard to focus and keep up with something unless I personally find it aesthetically pleasing or satisfying. And this applies to everything. Back in school and even now, the first thing I do when starting a Word or Excel file is spend an hour formatting it to perfection before I even write a single word. And I used to be very annoyed at myself for this because it seems like such a shallow, frivolous trait to have. But then sometimes, you just realise that you don’t always have to fight your “bad traits”, you just gotta make it work in your favour.
That’s what I realised when I decided to start the Sketchbook Project and bullet journalling. My working sketchbook is a big A3 one that is a purely practical/utilitarian beast, filled with plans and scribbled thumbnails that only I would understand. It is super useful, but a far cry from the super aesthetic sketchbooks from those of artists that I so admire like Gaia Alari (@gi.a.art) and Jared Muralt (@jaredmuralt) (honestly, they’re absolute sketchbook goals). So I went and got another sketchbook that I can fill with fully finished drawings done on location with almost zero prior planning, just so I can have a “pretty sketchbook” to a scratch my itch, and those drawings are now the most popular things I’ve ever made!
A similar story with bullet journalling, and just journalling in general. I need a planner to keep my life in check, but all it takes is one day of not bothering and there goes the whole thing. But the satisfaction of filling in one new square on a tracker, or opening a journal and watch my plans neatly nestled in a charming home of its own - now that’s motivation.
And I wish I can be like Cathy Hay (@cathy.hay) and just have the journal be an honest stream of conscious no frills brain dump, but if a novelty sticker and a doodle of a plant gives me the motivation to keep up with this new habit that is genuinely doing a lot of good for my mental well-being, why deny myself that little ego-stroking joy?
The big illustration project I am currently working on is a series of 6 artworks for Cluster Illustration, inspired by a mini-essay by George R. R. Martin “On Fantasy”. In the essay, George hypothesises that “we read fantasy to find the colours again,” and that is true. But there is also nothing stopping us from grabbing a bit of that colour to try and spice up the grey slog that is visa appointments and financial budgeting. After all, that is the ultimate goal under which my business, Mushroom Nook Studio operates - to bring a bit of magic into everyday adulthood.
There has always been a special place in on the list of things I hold absolute contempt for that is specially reserved for Brutalism, and it is my firm belief that the 50s and 60s were the worst thing to happen to architecture. The pioneers of the Brutalist movements believed that architecture should be purely functional; that cold, uniformed, concrete blocks are the great equaliser of society, promoting equality, for frills are luxuries peddled by the rich. But in stripping everything down to its pure functional core, they forgot another necessity that humans require to function - inspiration. It is all well and good that a building performs its duty of providing shelter. Are facade statues and ornamentations necessary to that duty? No, not really. But they are a big reason of why I chose to live in the UK. To stroll down the street and be casually in the presence of old statues of forgotten men inside their ridiculously ornate capsules, it makes me happy, every day. It adds a bounce to my step. And it motivates me to do something to contribute to this beautiful world that I get to share with them. And I am far from the only person who delights in such unnecessary grandeur, so perhaps they are not so unnecessary after all.
So spend half an hour finding the perfect font for your essay. Draw stars and stick stickers in your journal. Take notes in cursive with a quill. Labour over that title in your functional sketchbook that no one was going to see but you. Because it is not frivolous and unnecessary. Because if it works, it works, especially if that five minutes of vanity result in a continuous spike in productivity, and just, you know, joy.
-Alice
