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 are the small ones from the past 3 years. Brand-wise I was a committed Leuchturm 1917 purist until my recent love affair with Royal Talens (the last two).

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!

A sneak peek from the class: there’s a bit on raiding your sketchbooks for good GIF material!

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,