In my corporate life, I was rarely seen without a notebook. Meetings, conversations, ideas, decisions, to-do lists. Everything went in and losing it would have been a minor catastrophe.
Naturally, when I became an artist, I assumed the habit of writing things down or sketching ideas would follow me into the studio. It did not, alas!
I do have a lovely green-cover notebook gathering dust somewhere on the studio shelf. It contains a handful of colour ideas, ambitious plans and a couple of sketches, none of which made it onto the panel.
Partly, it's aphantasia. I can't visualise images in my head, which makes sketching something I might paint later rather tricky. Also, I don't know what I'm going to do next when painting until I'm actually doing it, so I cannot pre-plan anything.
I've tried documenting the process while painting, stopping to write down what I've just done. However, that breaks the very flow I'm trying to capture. And afterwards? I can remember individual decisions or marks, but rarely how I got from one to another.
Sometimes that's frustrating. I'd love to recall how I achieved a particular effect. Would I learn faster if I kept better records? Possibly. But I can't, so the notebook continues to gather dust…