Sketchbook Purchase Averted

100 Day Project Day 14

A new episode of Not A Real Artist, a podcast by Tamara Sagathevan (now Łuć) and Iris Fritschi-Cussens, dropped today. Yay. I love their podcasts, and I quite often put on older episodes in the background while I am creating, because they always spark thoughts, or just give me a sense of, I don’t know.. comfort? that there are people out there who see the world in similar ways to me?

Go listen, start with the new episode, go back to the beginning and listen to them all. Fall in parasocial adore with them. Feel seen.

As far as art goes, today I went to my sketchbooks and spent some time making backgrounds, and messy sketches.

I nearly bought a new sketchbook. I am not kidding. I had to have a word with myself, which involved taking out all my sketchbooks and pads and making a list of them, and it’s not funny. I couldn’t even find all of them. So I am banning myself from buying the sketchbook I am convinced I must have to make the best art in the world until I have made all the bad art and filled at least one book, and not the book that’s pretty close to being filled, because that’s cheating.

Yes, that’s a long stream of thought sentence, and I’m not apologising.

Anyway, it was a good exercise, and I ended up rearranging, and moving the ones I am working in to the rack beside my tall art table, and moving the energy around a bit.

One of the books in the stack is a book I made myself using up packaging I had saved from my Jackson’s Art orders. When I made the book, I decided it was going to be for figure drawing, and it got a start, but then it ended up on a high shelf, out of sight, out of mind.

Inspired by my rearranging, I did some work in it today. The container for this sketchbook is faces and figures using only a black chinagraph pencil. This pencil works really well on the brown paper, and it doesn’t rub out, so all the “mistakes” remain on the page, and I love that.

Another thing that ended up on a shelf abandoned was the book I bought around that time, the Figure Drawing Studio book, so I dragged that out and printed off some figures as references for my drawing practise.

The book itself is full of great instruction on figure drawing, but the main reason I bought it was because it comes with a CD with models posing in 64 different poses, but you can rotate the poses, so there’s something like 1,500 choices.

I don’t have access to an in-person life drawing class, so this is perfect for me. If I remember to use it.

As you can see, in this drawing from today’s practise, there are loads of places where I changed my mind, especially trying to get the legs right. The legs are slightly foreshortened, and I was drawing with the sketchbook flat, so I’m not going to get too critical here.

I see a LOT of sketchbooks online that are so very perfect, and I think that’s a product of the age of social media, and the way we are trained to curate ourselves. I am old, and old-skool, and I think sketchbooks very much should be full of mistakes and bad drawings.

However bad the drawing, this is a better use of the brown paper packaging than throwing it in the recycling 🙂

Til the morn,

Suzanne