I saw a conversation in response to a sketchbook tour video recently, and it’s a fairly common type of conversation that I’ve seen numerous times. Of course I now can’t find the post, but as I said, it’s a fairly common thing you see online.
The sketchbook in the video was a beautifully executed watercolour collection, and every painting was a complete, finished, pristine piece. You could have cut any page out and sold it as an individual painting, and as a book it’s a beautiful object too.
In the comments, someone reacted with a lengthy expression of insecurity about the paintings, and the fact that they could never hope to create a book like that. They told the artist they found her video too intimidating.
Now, I get it. The internet is full of artist sketchbook tours where the books are full of complete paintings, and it can have that effect, you can feel like your own art is not good enough. For me, I would keep that to myself, because it’s not up to an artist to hide their work for fear of someone feeling broken.
My own sketchbooks are not like that, they are random and messy, they often lack any consistency or theme, although I am experimenting with themes since I somehow managed to acquire a pile of sketchbooks, so I have the luxury of being able to just start a new one when a whim takes me.
I have taken a long time to build a sketchbook practise that is this free, that is less about filling complete pages that make sense, and more about just keeping moving and making marks and if it’s a shitshow, well that doesn’t matter, because even if it takes me all day procrastinating before I get into the thing, when I eventually get started, I alter my mood. So the end result is not important.
That’s really another skill or practise I have cultivated, to be able to make shit art and not be crushed with doom about it. It never means that all the art I make will be terrible. It never means, nowadays, that I put the supplies away and get stuck in a block.
So I was thinking about all this today when I was working on my hand studies, and it wasn’t going great, and I thought ‘but you know that’s fine, it doesn’t matter’.
In the photo are two pages from today. The bottom left image is the first page I did, and I had started out with a drawing in turquoise, trying to work out a placement for a distortion idea I am trying out. It went awry and I moved onto the next page, which is the top left image, and that went a bit better.
I then moved back to the first page and used the second page as a reference, and just drew things over the bad drawing. The ‘wrong’ lines helped with trying to get the new lines where I want them. I took that photo where it still looks messy, before moving on to using acrylic ink and paint and playing with the lines.
This is all to say that sketchbooks can be anything you want them to be, and they do not have to be pristine works of art. Having workbooks to play in, and make mistakes is just as valid, and I’m going to bet that any artist posting beautiful, viral, art books is going to have messy little books tucked away on a shelf.
I haven’t had a great week overall, but today was a change of mood, and indeed temperature, and the slower flow always shifts to a better pace if I keep plugging away.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
545/600
Thrummie Bizzum 
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