![]() ![]() I still keep sketchbooks, but my outlook on them has changed. Although I treasured them, they were far from precious. I would draw on the front and backs of pages, I would use pencil, ink, colored pencils, whatever I had around that would help facilitate my idea. They were ugly and clunky most of the time, but I had some real creative breakthroughs in those sketchbooks when I was a kid. They were the kinds you’d find at pharmacies or the cheap generic ones at the art store. I had tons of sketchbooks all throughout my childhood and teen years. It’s not like I didn’t have sketchbooks in the past. I also wouldn’t include anything functional like thumbnail drawings of comic and illustration ideas because that would clutter it up and make it look 'ugly'.Īfter several unsatisfying sketchbooks, I started to realize I was treating them more like portfolios than actual sketchbooks. I kept a separate sketchbook just for model drawing because those quick gestural poses didn’t really fit the ‘theme’ I had going on in my sketchbook. I mean, the pages were so soft and pretty and the whole thing was so expensive, one ‘wrong’ drawing could mess the whole book up! So, I stuck to what I knew I drew a lot of figures because that was one of my strengths and I filled up a lot of pages with overly detailed line work that looked really cool as far as page design goes, but didn’t really have much structure or substance underneath. From the start, I spent more time thinking about what I should draw in it than actually drawing in it. It was like there was some sort of force field between my pen and the page, preventing me from making a decent mark. That was harder than I thought it was going to be. I was so psyched to finally have a place where I could let loose and make the kind of free form, uninhibited work that all my favorite artists were making. I paid the expensive price for it, put it in my bag and took it home. It was hand bound, hardcover and had cotton rag pages that felt like a cross between paper and canvas. So I headed to the art store and bought the most precious book of blank pages I could find. It gave me a look at their thinking, their experiments, their work ethic, it was all super inspiring. As a young art student, I too wanted to be able to spew out pages and pages of inspired, free form work that I could keep neatly bound within a beautiful hardcover book and take with me everywhere I went. This allowed me glimpses and insights into the minds of the artists that I admired. There were a number of these artists who would regularly post pages from their sketchbooks on their blogs and websites and I would gawk and drool over every line, brush stroke, and coffee stain wash. More specifically, the sketchbooks of artists whose work I was a fan of. When I was in art school, I was obsessed with people’s sketchbooks.
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