1.1 Reasons to start a sketchbook
Here are some of the beautiful benefits of developing a sketchbook practice:
understand your preoccupations and curiosities
Your sketchbook is a powerful tool in helping you to understand, develop and explore your artistic interests and preoccupations and unpack what makes you curious in art and life.
Record your JOURNEY
Use a sketchbook to record the your creative development, progression and evolution.
JUST FOR YOU
Your sketchbook is for you. It can be a private and personal playground just for you. You don’t have to share it with anyone. Its contents do not need to be displayed, justified or explained to others, it can be a private conversation with yourself.
DEVELOP YOUR SKILLS
We learn to create by creating. We get better by doing. Your sketchbook is a place to create and do, develop and progress.
capturing a season of your life
Your sketchbook captures a season of your life. It can be very rewarding to keep all your sketchbooks and look back on where you were or what interested you at a certain time of your life. We can compare our own work against our own work and ask ourselves: Am I learning? Am I developing? Am I expressing myself? Am I feeling fulfilled by my output?
ALL IN ONE PLACE
Your sketchbook is a brilliant filing cabinet of ideas and your art.
A BEAUTIFUL THING
Your sketchbook can develop into a beautiful object in its own right. I really appreciate the way the completed pages of my sketchbook all sit together within one bound volume.
NOURISHING
There is something nourishing and rewarding about making art for yourself. I find experimenting in my sketchbook can lift my spirits and bring joy to my life. It can be extremely rewarding to turn a blank page into something alive with meaning or learning, colour or expression.
PROCESS NOT OUTCOME
Your sketchbook is a place to enjoy and learn from the process of creating. A sketchbook is not necessarily about completed art works. It is a place to explore process, expand on small fragments, develop your own artistic language and lexicon. I often find I learn the most from my worst pages, my failed attempts, the pages I don’t like. I invite you to think about your sketchbook as a place where you gain insight and wisdom from the ‘doing’ and that this insight isn’t necessarily based on whether you like the end result. Sometimes the magic happens in your brain and not on the page. The value can come from what you have learned in the process of creating, not from what you actually created.
CREATING MEANING
I have found that my use of sketchbooks has helped me to connect to myself. It has prompted me to be more conscious about the things in life which energise and enliven me. Using a sketchbook has been an exercise in discovery. It has invited me to think about what lights me up, what makes me curious, what makes me fascinated and what makes me feel expansive. My sketchbooks have become a place where I define what matters to me, where I unearth messages to myself, from myself.
INTERPRETING THE WORLD
Creating art is a way to interpret the world. When you start to draw something you often see what you are drawing with new eyes. The act of really looking at something invites you to see it differently. You gain new insight on your subject matter, you might discover something about it that you hadn’t noticed before. I often find that the act of drawing something, even a mundane object, reveals a hidden beauty in the subject.
Creating art is a way to explore our everyday experiences, a way to explore the world outside of us as well as a way to better understand/work through our internal world and emotions.
understanding and expressing yourself
By letting your art and imagination come to life on the page you are nurturing both spirit and soul and perhaps coming to know yourself more fully and deeply. Your art practice can be a form of meditation, reflection, discovery, expression, a way of exploring and bringing voice to your ideas and your true self.
It can be both an escape and a homecoming. A sketchbook allows you to express what you see, say, think and feel on your terms. A sketchbook is an invitation to create with no constraints.
the seed of something bigger
Your sketchbook can be the start of a stimulating conversation with yourself. Its pages can contain the beginnings of ideas that you may want to develop into paintings or larger artworks. A place to capture those ideas, realise those ideas, unpick those ideas until they turn into something that otherwise may dissipate or be lost in the ether. The start of something which takes you on a path to discovery.
