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Sketchbooks

Feb 05, 2022

Sketchbooks.  Something so mundane and so ordinary for any illustrator but something that is also so important. I’ve been using sketchbooks for years.  I remember when I was younger and I got a portfolio case for Christmas which was full of sketchbooks, pastels and charcoal.  I was about 10 at the time and absolutely loved to draw (not much has changed).  I used to have some “how to draw books” and would diligently copy the drawings in there and wonder how on earth the original artist managed to draw them without having something to copy.  Those initial sketchbooks slowly filled up and more were bought.  I don’t think I have ever thrown away a finished sketchbook, they’re all still stored around the house collecting dust.  There’s just something so lovely about being able to look back at the journey my art has gone through and to remind myself of just how much has changed. 


What does a sketchbook mean to me now?  Well, it’s probably the most important thing I own. 


My sketchbooks are full of good drawings, bad drawings and everything in-between.  They act as a sort of diary of my life and go through different stages and changes just like my life does.  There was one time where everything was very stubbornly orange and green and another where it all seemed to be beige.  Nowadays I like to mix up my colours and try to have no two pages the same.  My sketchbook has book ideas in it, loose thoughts and polished drawings.  It’s a mish-mash of everything I do and everywhere I go.  My favourite things to draw are landscapes with some added fun.  Drawing in Kew Gardens? great, but let me add an Orangutan in the trees or a monkey behind the flowers.  It’s somewhere that doesn’t have to make sense and a place where my art can just be without having any expectations.  


Of course as I’ve got better at drawing there’s the thought of oh no! My sketchbook looks beautiful and this drawing looks awful what do I do!  What do I do?  I just turn to the next page and draw something else or call it a day and try again tomorrow.  I don’t mind people looking through my sketchbooks, even the bad drawings serve a purpose. 

But let's go back to the beginning.  I got my first “proper” sketchbook when I started secondary school.  In art class we were each given an A5 sketchbook and told that this was going to be our book for the next three years.  It was black, bound and seemed so fancy.  Each week I diligently took it home and did my allocated two pages of art homework.  I studied artists, made copies of their work and drew my own pictures.  For the next few years that was the only sketchbook I used.  Can you imagine, three whole years and I still didn’t finish the sketchbook.  I hit GCSEs and the word “sketchbook” took on a whole new meaning.  Initially I didn’t think it mattered.  I vehemently argued with my mum that my GCSE sketchbook wasn’t important and wasn’t worth much of my final grade.  I thought the only art which mattered were our large scale paintings called “prep pieces” and that the sketchbook was sort of a secondary thing which didn’t matter. Mum thought otherwise and told me to ask the teacher if I didn’t believe her.  The next lesson I did just that and I have never forgotten the look on my teacher’s face as I said “My sketchbook doesn’t matter right?”.  The poor man looked both horrified and astonished as he told me that yes, they were important and were actually worth 70% of our final grade.  Oops.  I guess that should’ve clued me in to just how important sketchbooks were.  Did it though? not really.  At least not in anyway I would recognise today.  My GCSE and A Level sketchbooks were beautiful and were almost works of art themselves.  They were polished and detailed with hand painted backgrounds, boarders, hand cut lettering for all my titles, text hand written on acetate layers so you could life the flap and still appreciate the painting underneath and so much more.  They are a far cry from my raggedy sketchbooks nowadays which come out with me in the rain and have pages missing.


It was only when I started applying for University that I began to realise just how important sketchbooks were.  In the summer between year 12 and 13 I went on a summer course at Chelsea UAL in London which was all about preparing your university portfolio.  In the long list of art materials to take it said I needed a sketchbook.  It wasn’t to be anything too big or too precious so I went to Hobbycraft and bought a flimsy pink sketchbook.  That pink sketchbook turned out to be one of the most important pieces of work in my portfolio.  On the first day of the course we were taken to Tate Modern in London and told to go and find something to draw in our sketchbooks.  We had fifteen minutes and would gather after that to have a tutorial.  Off I went with my pencils and drew the most beautiful cherub.  Val my tutor took one look at it and said “Hmmm, I don’t want you to use pencil again for the rest of the day”.  She didn’t say it in a nasty way but I was stunned.  My cherub was lovely!  The problem? It was too lovely.  It was polished and shaded perfectly but didn’t have any life.  I found a whiteboard pen from somewhere and went off to draw something else.  We had a tick list of tasks which included “continuous line drawing” or “drawn with your left hand” which were meant to push us out of our comfort zone.  I put my whiteboard pen onto my paper and just drew.  I didn’t look too much at my paper and I didn’t take the pen off the page.  Looking back, I drew the best thing I had in a while.  It wasn’t perfect, it barely looked like the horse I was trying to draw but it had life.  That wonky horse had character and Val loved it.  I worked in that sketchbook for the whole week of the course and came out with a scruffy, collaged and cobbled together sketchbook full of ideas, experiments and life.  Your hands got dirty when you looked through it and it was so very different to my perfect A level sketchbooks.  When it came to my university interviews and portfolio reviews every single person was drawn to that sketchbook and I don’t think I would’ve got all the offers I did without it.

This way of thinking about sketchbooks carried on into my university course where we were told in definitive terms that all our work should be done in our sketchbooks.  That was where any rough ideas and thumb nailing was to go, that was where experiments and doodles were to go and that was also where all out artist research and essay prep was to go.  It became singlehandedly the most important thing I owed whilst also being one of the least precious.  Claire, my uni tutor, once said that if we went wrong or spilt something on our sketchbooks then it shouldn’t be the end of the world.  It was strange at first and initially I still tried to make my sketchbook look “nice” but this wasn’t A Level or GCSE anymore.  At those levels you were only filling three or so pages a week and there was time to make it look good.  On my illustration course I was filling three pages in a morning and there just was not enough time to get the hand cut letters out or to paint a pretty background.  It became a working document and something useful, not just something nice to look at.  Don’t get me wrong I was still producing beautiful work and polished finals but the sketchbook wasn’t the place where that was happening. 


In my first year of university I was also introduced to the idea of “drawing out”.  We had a separate module which ran alongside our main project which was called Observational Drawing.  It was a simple module, all we needed to do was draw. We were encouraged to do a drawing every day and it could be of absolutely anything.  I drew my uni kitchen, my plants, my flatmates and my family.  I drew the boats around Plymouth and my desk.  I drew anything and everything.  I remember being told that the aim of the project was to get us so used to drawing it was second nature.  By the end of the course you should be able to drawn anything from memory. 


 “You will be able to draw a tree without looking at a tree”


And so it began.  From then onwards I was always drawing in my sketchbook.  I don’t think I’ve been on a single holiday since without one.  They’ve travelled with me to Venice, Berlin, Switzerland, France, Canada and so many more places.  I’ve drawn on days out, in the car, on the beach and in the garden.  Finding the time to draw is one of the most rewarding things to do in our day.  I’ve talked about it before but when lockdown rolled around drawing was the only thing I could do (alongside the obligatory baking).  I spent so many days in the glorious sunshine sat in my garden just drawing.  I must admit there’s only so many times you can draw the end of your garden so I travelled virtually.  I hopped onto google maps and from the comfort of my garden I was transported to India, Vietnam and Africa and my sketchbook came along with me.


So what sketchbooks do I use and what do I take with me when I go drawing?  I've used a Royal Talens sketchbook ever since I found them in a small art Shop in Plymouth during my first year at University.  The paper is super thick, off white and pretty durable - the sketchbooks have a lovely feel to them too and come in lots of different colours.  I have an A4 one which feels like my "proper" sketchbook where I'll do a big A3 drawing across a double page using reference drawings and observation.  I love this sketchbook but it is a little bit too big to comfortably carry around everywhere unless you like to always take a rucksack with you.  This means I also have small A6 and A5 sketchbooks which are the ones I normally take with me on days out and walks.  They're small enough to fit into my coat pocket but also big enough to fit a nice sized sketch onto. 


I'm also an avid brush pen and pencil lover.  I use Tombows, Fabercastell Pencils and Derwent Pencils and layer them up to create a drawing rich in texture and layers.  I also take my watercolour palette with me to bulk out the backgrounds and colours.  I always try and change which colours and pencils/pens I take with me on a drawing trip as it makes my sketchbook more interesting and fun to look through. 


How I use sketchbooks has changed so much over the past 14 years I've been drawing in them and I'm sure it will change again in the future.  You can use your sketchbook however you like and the exciting part is figuring it all out. 



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It's been a while hasn't it? I think it's been a good few months since I’ve written a blog post and this was pretty much my face when I realised just how long it's been! Life just got away from me and before I knew it I was packing up my art supplies and moving to start my new job. If you follow me on instagram you’ve probably seen me ramble on about personal projects and portfolios, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few months (and also why I've not been around much). I applied for my new job all the way back in March (doesn’t time go fast?) but the start date wasn't until September so that left me five months to work on my art without worrying about job applications and CVs. I knew I wasn’t going to get this sort of opportunity again for a while so thought “why not update my portfolio, website and do a project just for fun?” so that’s exactly what I did. I know as illustrators we’re told to always have an up to date portfolio on the go but I must admit, I’m the kind of illustrator who enjoys making art too much. I always put off the scanning, editing and putting together of my work because it takes so much time. In the time it takes me to get three sketchbook drawings up to portfolio standard I could’ve done a whole day of drawing and produced five more sketchbook pages! But portfolio updates have to be done sooner or later and my last one was ages ago so it desperately needed to happen. My work has changed and developed so much over the past year and half that I was actually excited to see what it would look like formatted nicely together. I always work in A4 sketchbooks, normally across a double page so I end up with an A3 drawing. I’ve only got an A4 scanner though so that always means a lot of frustration and hope that the scanner gets through (it’s also very old). Scanner woes aside, I also find it hard to work out just what to put in my portfolio. As a general rule of thumb I try to stick to around 20 pages because no one wants to sit through 50 pages of my work, no matter how good I think it is. So on a random day in May I got together all my most recent sketchbooks and a pile of sticky notes and set about trying to choose. I sticky noted almost every drawing. Which was a problem. But I told myself that you never know what they look like edited and some might come out better than others so I might as well scan them all. I should add that I like to work in Royal Talens sketchbooks and they have an off white, creamy coloured paper. When I edit drawings I always like to put them onto a white background so there’s some magic which has to go on to make sure that the colours stay true to how I want them, even when the base paper colour changes. I also became a pro on my scanner settings. Normally I don’t give them a second look and just click “scan” but this time I made sure to adjust the backlight, exposure, noise correction and other fancy toggles I had completely ignored before. Eventually I managed to get some settings which made the scanned image look pretty much the same as the drawing, but with the creamy paper taken away. Turns out I was right and some cleaned up better than others. Grey is a really tricky colour to get right. Some of my grey pens come out so similar to the cream background that trying to take away one often takes the other away with it. So that instantly got rid of some drawings for me, which was a bonus (although I have since gone back to those drawings, scanned them in again and they’re now in my portfolio).
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