Sketchbook Jail
I've unintentionally got myself into sketchbook jail and only recently freed myself.
I love seeing other pople's sketchbooks. I will watch longwinded sketchbook tours on YouTube with stars in my eyes. But my relationship to my own sketchbooks has always been bad. I would start them, lovingly work on them for a while, eventually get overwhelmed, abandon them, start a new one after while, feel absolutely guilty about the old one. And so on. I never really understood why. I admired those who had sketchbooks filled from cover to cover on a regular basis. It took a long while till I realised that I overthinked (overthought?) myself into sketchbook jail.
What I mean by sketchbook jail
I will not blame it entirely on the "content" that I watch. Part of it is probablt the 'tism taking what I saw and making hard rules about it like the tyrant that it sometimes can be. So here are those rules:
- it should have a coherent style - this is obviously dumb....it's a SKETCHBOOK not a designed finished piece.
- I need to work in it chronologically, like keeping a journal. Older sketches should be left untouched for posterity.....ugh? what? brain, WHY? Just go over them you idiot.
- and since it's almost a journal, ALL projects ever need to have their home in there.....you mean that really big project that needs a pretty structured notebook to make any sense? Yeah. Just chuck it in with the sketches of my cat, fanart and random bloat.
- speaking of random bloat: I also need to finish these things at a constant pace so I better do "sketchbook filling" activities just for the sake of it...oh no, now it looks bad!
- also, why not use it as a journal/planner? People with bullet journals have such beautiful notebooks. Turns out my bujo style is chaos and unintelligible lists. (this is a story for another post entirely)
- and the dumbest of them all: I need to do all of the above, but also I'd like to always have the exact same format notebook...what if by the time I'm at my 15th sketchbook they go out of stock? Oh no...streak ruined.
This, of course, is STUPID.
When I finally realised that I'm being ridiculous I set out to escape my self imposed sketchbook jail.
First I made my own sketchbook out of bits and pieces I loved from the others. A Frankensketchbook if you will. It is a chonker. It has over 200 pages. It's dot grid. The cover is made out cardboard, a cover I loved that was too small and an old t-shirt (not kidding). It is slowly collecting stains and scuffs and marks and stickers. And because I like fighting fire with fire, I made myself new rules:
- embrace the chaos and the mess.
- timey whimey. There's no chronology. Anything can be modified and added to later. Not to mention that why fill apgeas in order? The middle pages are better for larger spreads!
- fill every little inch of it. Go back and doodle in between doodles. Color in backgrounds when bored. Just have fun.
- not all projects need to live in there. I have a separate sketchbook for Staigdin and two notebooks for actual art pieces: one for illustration and painting and one for collages.
- and my favourite and most freeing: do not finish it any time soon. This one has made it so fun for me. This rule makes me go back on pages and squeeze in stuff. It keeps me away from just doing bloat to fill my pages, and when I have shit pages I will go over them or even glue stuff to cover it. My favourite technique has been picking out the drawing I actually like from my sketchbook graveyard and using them to cover the failed itterations of something. This way I can get rid of the shelf of shame soon and just have all my stuff where it makes me happy.
And it does make me happy. I haven't had so much fun being in my sketchbook since forver. I love just flipping though it but also looking for space to put a small sketch instead of on a fully blank page. And by the time I'm done with the small doodle I had in mind it's part of something bigger, a larger design. I not longer look at it as "is this all I can do" but at a bigger picture of all I can do.
My sketchbook feels like a safe place to spill my brain in rather than another project.