| Journaling With More Speed and Ease | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Part
I:
Doing the Splits
By
Guest Author: Joanna Campbell Slan |
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 You'll
journal and scrapbook with more speed and ease if you divide your
scrapbook page making activities into two tasks, page layout and journaling.
Journaling is a left brain activity and page layout uses the right side of
your brain.
Your left brain thinks in a linear fashion. This side of your brain wants to create lists, number items and produce a chronological order. Your vocabulary resides in your left brain, although one expert has suggested that curse words are stored in the right side of your brain. (I haven't seen a scrapbook page featuring curse words, but I know that some days I've ached to create one. Well, not really, ached…but on bad days I have thought the curse words might be more appropriate than regular sanitized language.) When you journal, you must tap into your left brain to call up words, punctuate sentences, and build meaning into your paragraphs.
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Your right brain
is a free spirit. This side of your brain is artistic, wholistic
and feeling. Your choices of paper, color, design, lettering styles,
and embellishments come from your right brain. As you touch papers, compare
colors, and crop photos, your right brain responds with agreement or suggestions.
Splitting your scrapbook tasks into Left Brain and Right Brain activities
helps you build momentum. When you go to a crop, you don't want
to stop and journal. And you probably shouldn't for a
variety of reasons. Crops are a perfect example of the
energy produced by being totally into one side of your brain.
New ideas come, seeing others' pages stimulate you, and your whole being
is transported into cut and paste heaven. You're living in your right brain,
baby. You may have also experienced this while cropping at home. Last night while
I was working on a layout, my husband gently suggested that our
son was upstairs in bed and waiting for me to tuck him in.
Ahem. Was I coming? Pulling myself away from the page I
had before me was an act of sheer will. Later, I lay in
bed thinking of a design challenge I'm having with that page. I
pondered: Should I change the colors? Would adding a border around the journaling
tie the elements together? How about silhouette cropping my photo?
? This experience of total absorption is actually good for you because
flow adds to your joy in life while allowing you to concentrate for long
periods. In your left brain, flow works the same way. Thus explaining why you can be
totally absorbed in straightening a closet, balancing your
checkbook, or folding and putting away laundry. Mihaly Csikszentmihali's national bestseller Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, defines this blissful state as what happens when
consciousness is harmoniously ordered, a state he calls
"flow." Then he explains, "One of the most
frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts,
one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life. This feature
of flow is an important by-product of the fact that enjoyable activities
require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand-thus leaving
no room in the mind for irrelevant information." Whether you think of
it as flow or momentum, keeping with one scrapbook task or the other seems
to give energy and make us more productive. Materials Used In Layout
Sample Above: Be sure to click here for part 2 of this 3 part article by Joanna Campbell Slan.
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