I’m a woman entering menopause. This means that – among other things – I don’t have the seemingly endless energy that I did just a few years ago, so I need to be very efficient with the energy I do have.

First I’d like to make the distinction between creative energy and productive energy. Creative energy is required to come up with new ideas, while productive energy is what we need to execute our already familiar processes. Productive energy is more easily replenished by taking care of the body, and in my experience, if I enter the studio low in this type of energy, by JUST STARTING, things begin to flow.

I’ll likely write about how I access and replenish my creative energy in a future post. But for this post, the topic is having an insurance policy for the times when the creative well has run dry. This is where a sketchbook comes in. I treat my sketchbook like a journal – not meant for reading or viewing by anyone else but me. It’s more messy and embarassing than I’d prefer, because my drawing skills are sorely underdeveloped (this image is one of the more developed spreads that I’m willing to share). Drawing well is not the point of my sketchbook, just as writing well is not the point of my journal. It is to capture IDEAS, adequate enough to bring them back to mind, or spark another related idea.

This is invaluable for me during times of low creative energy. I flip through my sketchbook, looking first at those pages I’ve flagged because there are some interesting ideas on them. Sometimes that is enough to get the juices flowing for a new composition, form or embossing plate design. At other times, going back to pages from an artistic period I’ve moved on from, I find some new perspective on a motif or shape that I did not see before, and it is brought back to life again, in a reincarnated form.

The other way I use my sketchbook is similar to what Natalie Goldberg recommends in her book, “Writing Down the Bones”, and Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages – a method for cleaning out the mental pipes so that the clear creative waters can flow. And from that process too, some ideas worthy of exploration can be recorded.

This is why I think of my sketchbook as a savings account. When I’ve got no creative juice, those deposits made are there for me, collecting interest, and ready to be cashed in when I need them most.