Trivial Stuff Only Artists Worry About

I keep an illustrated journal and have for the past 47 years. I am not making that up. I started it in 1968 when I was in high school and have kept it ever since. Most of my journals have illustrations, doodles, and scribbles in them. Once I became a professional artist though, these journals got "organized" and I put sketches in them that might be preliminary drawings for larger work. Or they were "reality" drawings depicting things in my world like glassware, stacks of books, flowers, buildings, or coffee machines. The "reality" drawings had to correspond to the journal entry near it on the page. Lots of famous artists like Van Gogh or Turner used to do this, so if it was good enough for them it was certainly good enough for me.

But what happens when there's too much reality and not enough journal? Or the other way, too much journal and not enough reality? I've had that problem lately with my 2015 journal. I write in it and put my daily entry in (usually only a couple of paragraphs), and then I either forget or run out of stuff to draw in it. I had a "theme" for my journal in 2015 that it should have my industrial patterns and other complex small drawings done in brown technical pen. The winery and architectural and on-site stuff was done elsewhere. So I reserved space for the mini drawings in my journal notebook. And I didn't draw'em. There are holes in my closely written pages where these drawings are supposed to go. Grumble! I'd better do more journal drawings! But they don't correspond to any reality I was writing about. What to do? I must RE-Date these drawings so I will know when I drew them. Thus this little piece, drawn on August 31, appears over the written entry for July 18. That's reality for you, temporal and artistic dislocation in the service of an artist's vanity. 

Steel mill structure looks like a castle! "Industrial Patterns 11" is brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, about 3.5" x 3.5", August 31, 2015.