Sketchbooks

You love em’ or you hate em’.

I have a complicated relationship with sketchbooks. My entire artistic career I’ve been told they are super important for practice, ideas, sketches, tests, etc; but I can’t get myself to stick to them very well. I’ve only ever completed one sketchbook, back in my senior year of high school. I bought a new, bigger and better sketchbook less than a week later, 4 years into college that sketchbook is still not done, and I haven’t effectively kept a sketchbook since. Until this past semester. I was in a class called The Artist’s Notebook, admittedly, I took it because it was a class I needed to graduate.

I could tell I was gonna struggle in the class before the class even started, mainly from external emotional turmoil, moving, grief, and finishing up my senior thesis. Rough semester! I took this as an opportunity to channel the never-ending-ness of my brain into this sketchbook.

My very first page was simply writing literally every thought that came to mind for an hour or so. That set the tone for the remainder of the sketchbook. Suddenly, I was completing 5+ pages in one sitting when I used to struggle to finish 1. Using it as a ‘visual diary’, as I like to call it, collaging papers from my day, writing things I told my therapist in code, just noodling if I didn’t have an idea. I finally felt like I could finish another sketchbook. Not every page has to be a masterpiece.

Now, this sketchbook isn’t done yet, about 10 blank pages left, but I’d like to share some of my favorite pages.