Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Sketchbook Pages: Inspired by Jill K. Berry

I took advantage of Cyber Monday last week and ordered some books off Amazon. One of the books I chose is Personal Geographies (Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking) by Jill K. Berry. I love maps - making them and using them as collage material - so I thought this would be a good book for me.

I was right! I read through it quickly and was itching to get creative the whole time. Luckily, I unpacked some more of my supplies this weekend, so I was able to do just that. The prompts are easy and fun and don't require a lot of strange supplies that I'd need to go buy. I'll definitely be turning back to this book again and again.

Before breaking out my collage materials though, I doodled away in my sketchbook Friday night after finishing the book. I tried a quick and dirty variation of one of the prompts and then made a map of the work I do in the lab (a typical journal page for me but one I wouldn't have thought to do last week without the book's prompting).

Here are those pages:
A "map" of my hand and all that they have done for me through the years. I started in my pinky with imagery from my childhood, then progressed through high school (ring finger, where I met Pat), University (middle finger) and my first job (index). My thumb is left to bring me into the future and my palm holds all the things that I love doing with my hands (plus includes my unique identifiers: my scars from wrist surgery).

And here is my blood processing map for a typical blood sample. There are different methods we follow that all fall under that "centrifugation" umbrella but there are also a dozen or more other procedures we do depending on what the researchers are looking for in the blood (biomarkers, drug levels, cells, etc).

I have a few more sketchbook pages from this weekend that I have yet to show, but I think I'll keep them for my creative space on Thursday. I need to start getting ready now and make something for supper for Pat tonight (and for me to bring to work). Have a great day! 

2 comments:

Katherine said...

The blood processing map is so neat! I don't know why I like it so much, but I do. It's kind of like a grown-up version of Richard Scarry's "What Do People Do All Day?" I suppose. :)

Jill Berry said...

What a great treat to find you making maps over here! I am so glad you are inspired by my book, I still love it and all my heart is in it. Will bookmark you and come back to see what you are up to!