The purpose of a sketchbook and some early January reading

Not all sketchbook pages should be "nice"

There’s this funny trend going around the internet where artists are showing their “sketchbooks” but every page is a completely finished painting. In my mind this is not what a sketchbook is for. That’s great and all but that’s a series of finished works that happen to be in a bound book. The idea of a sketchbook in my mind is a place to try out things, some pages will be more like finished pieces, some are just trying to figure out where the legs and hands go, and a lot of “bad” pages where things maybe didn’t work out.

I’ve had the above horizontal bound sketchbook for the last year, and I struggle to work in it because of it’s permanence, all those pages are attached, what if a page is really bad? In my younger days I would just glue together the pages I didn’t like, which means when I look back on my old sketchbooks now there are sometimes up to 10 pages superglued together, no idea what any of those pages at one time contained.

These days I generally prefer a spiral bound sketchbook, and I like to designate a separate one for each big project, so I can do color swatches, character sketches, write down ideas and it’s all fairly organized. Since it’s spiral bound I also can rip out a page if it gets real “bad”. That being said, it would be nice to see more sketchbook work online that isn’t finished and perfect.

I drew this person in that super bound sketchbook, what’s her deal? I don’t know either, maybe she swallowed the world.

This is what most pages look like, just figuring out figures and how they sit, and sometimes they’re ok and other times, it’s like the kid on the top left who’s missing a whole second leg. Sometimes when I don’t know where to start I open up Flickr (YES!) and scroll through old feeds and just draw people and random things from there.

Aside from sketchbooks, I’m working on a few new pieces, and have had a relatively slow start into my normally very reading heavy weeks. I finished 2 books so far this year, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner which I really enjoyed, I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy which was also great, though very different. My copy of Swimming Home I got used at Powells and the previous owner left a lot of commentary in the margins that was pretty entertaining.

(new Crabby cup courtesy of my brother and sister in law, because I chipped my original one like a mug MONSTER on accident)

I think to create some consistency I’m going to try to start posting on here on Tuesdays, I’ve declared in this new year that Tuesday is computer day, treat day (Treat Tuesday), and I guess by default, internet day. I’d like to share recent reads and sketches and works in progress going forward.