Sketchbook Tour

I’ve always had a weird relationship with sketchbooks. I love seeing other artists’ sketchbooks and seeing a more intimate look inside their practice, but I find drawing on a blank sheet of paper so daunting. I can appreciate the value of working loosely and iteratively in a private space all to yourself, but I also feel the pressure of making something beautiful or worth sharing. In my mind, other people’s sketchbooks are way prettier than mine and I feel the need to make my sketchbook spreads presentable or so representative of me that doing otherwise wouldn’t be worth my time.

At a deeper level, I think this way of thinking reveals the mechanisms of internalized perfectionism, which is something I have wrestled with my entire life, whether that be in my creative practice or not. For me, in order to grow as an artist, I want to move past these attitudes and begin exercising more artistic liberty in my practice.

So this year, as I’ve entered the creative industry, I decided to shift my approach to sketchbooking by developing a more exploratory attitude when it came to drawing and creating work in my sketchbooks. I began following different artists on Youtube (ex. Furry little peach, Leigh Ellexson, Cheyenne Barton – just to name a few) that I felt embodied this attitude so I could learn from their methods – even if it meant just watching at first. Eventually, their work inspired me to try new mediums and new ways of drawing in my sketchbook that felt a lot more free and fun.

BUT today is a day to peruse one of my favorite sketchbooks that I completed (the only one of its kind for now in my collection haha) in my 1st year of art school. The story behind it is that I knew going into this class (Creative process with John Wertschek – IYKYK) that the only way to get an A+ was to complete my sketchbook spreads in a thoughtful and beautiful manner. I get that this sounds like more of the internalized perfectionism I was talking about earlier, but to be fair, this class was actually very valuable in teaching me the importance of documenting my process throughout my work. It was kind of a pivotal moment in learning to sketchbook a whole new way – even if I didn’t know it at the time.

Disclaimer: There are a lot of pages in this sketchbook so if you just want to browse the images, feel free to do so!

Cover

Whenever I started a sketchbook in school, I always titled them so I knew which class it was for. This was for my creative process class, but since I tend to freehand most of my work, I ran out of space to write the full words “creative process” so instead it just says “creativ proces”. Haha.

Day 1

My first official class and it was crazy! If you look on the left at the blue strip, you can vaguely make out “is everyone in art school crazy?”. Haha, to be fair, my prof was pretty out there. I also wanted to make it a practice of taking notes in the form of journal entries as seen on the right.

Empathy

As part of our sketchbook exercises, my professor tasked us with creating a spread for random words. To me, empathy embodied this idea of warmth and depth and I felt that could only be best expressed through an abstract painting.

Day 2

Thus began our first project: before our semester began, John sent out an email to everyone in class telling us to bring MOON to class. I don’t remember exactly how he phrased it, but he never attached the word “the” before “MOON”. It was bizarre, but everyone brought some form of MOON to class, and it was really cool to see what people came up with. My friend once told me, “Try not to think of Creative Process so much as a class and more of an experience”. That shifted my whole approach to this class and made it so much more enjoyable.

MOON

Because we had such a large class, it wasn’t until the 3rd or 4th class that I got to present what MOON was to me. At that point, I had gone through several iterations of MOON, and the one I wanted to present to my class was a print of my butt.

Dragon Project

This project was prompted with the statement:

Integrity

Thinking about my family and the experiences I’ve been through, I wanted to capture the fragility and delicacy of my familial ties.

Chaos

To me, chaos is a state of overwhelm and madness. I really wanted to make the colours messy and make it as dense as I could. Playing around with contrast, I also really liked the idea of chaos (scribbling) with a structured grid of written “chaos” and the word “order” in the center.

Curiosity

At the time, I had just turned 19 and drinking was (and is) still pretty foreign to me. I remember my first sip of red wine and how awful it tasted to me. It tasted like liquid fire, hahah.

Courage