Sometimes - A Great Notion...

I always stress to students the value of a 'drawing book'. (1)
And keeping your drawing books. (2)

For the upcoming Elora Gallery 'Fire & Steel' exhibit, each artist was asked to contribute up to three pieces (more on my submissions later).
I was stuck on a third object. My hope was to create a new work just for this exhibit. 

I had a concept for a piece - a continuation of my Windbile series.
This would be a large squid, forged arms outstretched in a twisted helix, with a hammered copper body. I knew I had some concept drawings, someplace.
A bit of a surprise when I finally went digging :

Current rendition - February 2019

Version 2 - (about) January 2016

Original concept - Summer 2007

 So this may be taken a couple of ways:
- 'Old Dogs vs New Tricks'
- A 'Good Idea' endures
- NEW ideas can be hard to find

In the end, recent events conspired to make this extremely unlikely. (3)
So the drawing books go back on the shelf, and although the work on forging the arms (at least) has been partially undertaken, it is hard to say when (if) the sculpture will ever be completed.


Notes:
1) What your drawing book is FOR - is not what you got told by your high school art teacher. It is merely an 'aid to memory'. It most certainly is NOT about 'rendering'. I do suggest that you scratch down some lines. (The more often you push the pen, the better your skill at rendering will become. It is another hand skill, like using the hammer - you improve with practice.)
What goes INTO the book does not matter. The mere act of recording anchors your ideas. (This is why a phone image is almost useless.) Draw, write. Even stick in images cut from magazines (I most certainly do this as well). 
- I recommend the larger 8 1/2 x 11 size, mainly because there is more room to expand the drawings - and this size fits nicely on to most scanners to allow for web site / e-mail use.
- Right now I am using a $3 book I got at the local Dollar Store. The paper is thick, and has a nice tooth for pencil (although I mainly work with a roller ball pen). The individual sheets are actually perforated (so you could tear something out if you wanted - although I never do). It is spiral bound, so it sits flat for use or scanning. (Bonus there is that a drawing pen fits neat inside the spiral.)
- My past books have been those black, hardcover 'sketch books' you would get at an art supply store. As I constantly carry my book with me, I have found that typically the bindings tear off these, and a fitted cover helps a lot to reduce this. (Surprisingly, the cheaper spiral bound is not having this problem = win / win.)

2) I actually have my drawing books - all of them, going back to my first high school art class - in grade 10 (when I was 16!). That first book is NOT as I describe here. Each page has a completed concept drawing! (So not the roughs - the actual final versions). Over my own long decades of using drawing books, I find my drawings are getting sketcher and sketcher. That is primarily because the purpose is just to remind *me* of my original idea. The book is NOT for anyone else. I normally transfer these loose concepts through several versions in the process of developing a project :
Clear line drawing illustrations
Scaled production drawings
Technical detail drawings

3) Some reading may have caught that we had a major snow disaster here at Wareham during that warm snap in early February. A large section of the brand new deck roof collapsed. A good week lost clearing this away and dismantling the damaged section!