I found it on Notes to the Milkman, and he found it on Mags Phelan's site, and she found it... and so on.  But what they found was the sketchbook project.  It's a project to send out sketchbooks (well duh!) to those who want to join in - for a fee, obv - and then collect them all in by a given date to form a giant travelling artists' book library.  You have to pick a theme - there's a good listful - but you don't have to stick to it too slavishly.  The deadline for ordering is this next week, the end of the month (I think), and then sketchbooks have to be sent back postmarked January 15th or earlier, so obviously we're at the fag-end of this year's project.  I can't decide whether to go for it - and then feel pressured to do it, maybe getting in the way of other nascent projects - or wait for next year's.  I'm going to have to make my mind up quickly though - or not, of course, and run out of time so that the decision's made for me.

Or maybe I'll do it, but unofficially.  Get or make my own sketchbook to the right proportions and with the right number of pages, pick a theme, fill the book.  Not to send in (I couldn't, it wouldn't be standard issue with a barcode an' all), but for the discipline of it.  Yes, but would I?  What are the chances? 

Other people's blogs provide endless inspiration, don't they, one way or another.  Notes to the milkman was talking about gesture drawing, which I think means the really quick scribbly sketches you try to do when you hope you can finish before whoever it is looks up, or before whatever you're travelling in moves on too far beyond whatever you're sketching.   Actually, I suspect I'm missing the point and they have to be sketches of people moving?  Well, I'm taking it to mean really quick sketches anyway.  I have any number of these, I find.  I've mentioned that I can't cope with all the promise of a blank page in a sketchbook - how can I violate that pristine territory with something imperfect? -  and that instead I sketch on tatty scraps.  Thank goodness I manage to treat my bag like a temporary paper recycling bin, so that at least there always is a tatty scrap.  Or at the very least the inside cover of a cheque book (please don't get rid of cheque books...).  I'm rambling.

Yes, so all these sketch/doodles end up in a great heap of paper (kept in boxes, to look less heap-like).  The heap is everything - letters I really ought to keep, pics torn from magazine, articles I mean to read one of these days, spare bits of paper that surely are still useful for something, paper bags as sad mementos of shops long gone (Quarto bookshop in St Andrews, anyone?  Papyrus in Bath?).  And sketches.  Occasionally I trawl through a fraction of the heap (it goes back years), more or less applying my 10% rule, which is that if you chuck out 10% of the stuff, then that surely counts as progress.  I extract these scrawled lines, often think hey, that's got something (we're not talking skill or versimilitude here), and have taken to sticking them in a notebook as possible future inspiration for something.  Anything.  And however sketchy the doodle, it always takes me right back to when and where, so at least it functions as a sort of diary.

(Fishermen by the reservoir and kids at a swimming lesson - very very sketchy though not much movement.  Except maybe the fish?  Got to be honest, though, I don't think these are ever going to develop into anything)

But the point was that the very notion of such careless scribbles as John highlighted attracted instantly.  I know we should all be sketching every day.   I also know I don't.   But that blog has made me decide to do just that.  Alright, it probably won't count as gesture drawing, because nothing will be moving fast enough, if at all.  But it'll be something at least.  - nothing careful, just on the hoof and brief.  With so little expectation riding on the end result, I'm far more likely to do it.

And then there was Elizabeth Willow's and Jonathon Raisin's Lincolnshire blog, something wonderful is coming.  Elizabeth mentioned it last week, so I had a look (mostly rain - but why should I be surprised?  England this year is mostly rain) and felt all inspired by the photo-collections, reminiscent of their own museum list.  I'm always fascinated (sometimes incredulously, I confess) by collections of like things - I would have liked to visit Hans-Peter Feldmann's exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, earlier this year, but of course I didn't.           

(Some photos borrowed from the Something Wonderful blog - a selection, not a collection)


So do I want to make my own grouped photos (hell, I've probably already got enough chimneypots and lampposts), or do I want to visit Lincolnshire (flat places really are excitingly different countries)?  Both?