Observation Journal: Questions for project reviews

Project reviews have been a useful aspect of the observation journal. These aren’t productivity/time-management types of reviews. They are about going back over the patterns in my own work, picking up threads I want to follow in the future, recording the epiphanies I always have and quickly forget. (See also previous project review posts for how they’ve evolved.)

I had by now done enough of these reviews that I knew the questions which worked best for me. Yours may vary, but here is the tidied-up version of mine. I’ve printed them out and keep them at the back of my notebook.

Questions for project review:

• The common questions:
  • Things that worked / things I was happy with
  • Things I disliked / could do better
  • Difficulties
  • Things to try in future / ideas I had while doing the project
  • Why did I choose this? What alternatives didn’t I pursue?
  • What did I leave out / evade / avoid?
  • Tendencies I noticed / things I resisted
  • [Added 21/8/22] Ideals
• The occasional questions:
  • How did I get it started/finished
  • What was the process I followed
  • Specific lessons I learned
  • How did people respond?
  • If I did this exact project again, what would I do differently?
  • If I never do a project like this again, which aspects would I try to find/use in other projects?
  • Could I have streamlined a difficult/unlikeable part, or found someone else to do it?

Here are three examples:

The first is a review of the August 2020 Wildflower calendar art.

It was useful to record the process because I do these calendar pages so often, and yet I’m always startled by how long certain aspects (getting started, colour flats) take me. It also let me identify a couple of techniques that I wanted to learn.

The next was for a tiny story I had written for a few patrons, “Shadowmill”.

It was good, here, to work out why this story caught my interest (promise, episodic, aesthetic), and what appealed and didn’t about a less-usual way of working: the unpredictability of it, and the potential of the elongated shape.

The next page was a review of the drawings I did in the window at Avid Reader to promote Flyaway.

Drawing on a window was a new technique for me. Much of this, therefore, was to record some very practical (and often, in retrospect, obvious) lessons about cleaning glass first, etc.

A couple of the big ones:

• Keeping plans flexible and drawing freehand was a very good idea when I’m familiar with the style/subject matter but not the exact space I could use or the materials— I was less stressed and able to change things on the fly.
• Drawing is physical and large drawings more so.
• Make sure someone else is getting photos.
• When drawing (especially drawing large) in public:
  • have someone delegated to update social media as you go, because people got really into it; and
  • have a sign telling people who is drawing and why.

You can see previous project-review posts under the category project review.

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