A look inside my sketchbooks!
How sketchbooks have helped me find my visual voice and capture time.
This month I’ve been working on a secret project that I can’t share just yet, but I asked on instagram what you’d like to hear about, and most said sketchbooks!
Everyone keeps sketchbooks in a different way. I keep two at a time: a big one for working on commissions and projects, and a small one almost exclusively for observational / location drawing.
These more personal sketchbooks have been so important to me in finding my voice - I can date certain stylistic evolutions back to individual spreads. These for example:
The first was during my 3rd year of uni. I was going through an awful art block and I went to a café to draw. Maybe it was the fact that I only had a few pencils with me, so I had to layer colours in surprising combinations to make the colours I could see. In any case something opened up for me and changed about the way I thought about drawing.
The second was from the same year. I remember feeling like those apples could teach me all the secrets of colour! It was the first time I had realised how vivid everything could be.
And on a personal level, it is so wonderful to be able to keep days and feelings through these records. I like the way John Berger puts it in his essay, Drawn to That Moment (you can read the whole thing here),
The drawn image contains the experience of looking. [It] encompasses time.
As someone who’s moved around a lot, I’m very aware that moments spent in a particular place are fleeting, but the pages of my sketchbook let me keep some of those moments and return to them.
Lately I’ve been enjoying taking walks at sunrise. There’s a castle wall going around Dinan which has lovely views over the valley. There are few things more fleeting than a sunrise and I love the urgency of trying to record something beautiful before it disappears. One day on my walk, I was amazed at how in the space of 5 minutes, the yellow-pink sky turned grey and misty and the sun went silver like a second moon!
And now a quick update on my Skillshare class: it’s getting there, slowly! I thought the hardest part would be speaking in front of the camera, but in fact the editing is taking me much longer than I thought it would! My new goal is the end of the year and I promise you’ll be the first to know when it’s out!
That’s it for this time, I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to reply to this and let me know what topics you’d like to see me talk about in the future.
Wishing you a warm and cheerful ending to the year,
Thank you for sharing this, it's such a wonderful insight to hear how other artists work.
P.s I have just ordered one of each sketchbooks you mentioned! I always have several on the go at anytime and look forwards to trying these.
I love the page with the trees, the colors you use are so warm and playful yet still realistic! I use my sketchbooks in a similar way to you, a big one for figuring out projects and a smaller one for sketching/playing. I've been enjoying your newsletters and your art for a while and I have to say I'm also a bit jealous of how much you travel and the lovely view from your window :)