Sketchbooks

Drawings from my sketchbook.  Keeping a sketchbook is so important as an artist-it is a place to be erase, alter, plan...

My friend Hannah is an amazing artist & often shares her sketchbooks on her blog.  Honest & inventive, always inspiring.

As a grad student, most of my ideas were visually developed on woodblocks ( I am a printmaker by heart).  I treated the birch surface as a sheet of paper; drawing, erasing & eventually carving the image.  The only record of the image was the finished print on paper.  I kept a sketchbook that was almost* all text.  Ideas, to do lists, words (time, nothing, everything, breathing), titles of books I was reading for my thesis (this one was my favorite)...

*save for the occasional house, heart and tornado doodle**

**and once, a ghost, which was a similar image my friend drew, hundreds of miles away...art crush forever?  

It was during my residency (2010) that I began to make and preserve my sketches.  I saved those compositional images & studies on small scraps of paper from that time, all floating around in the organized chaos of my studio.  Obviously, I needed a better way of keeping track of my ideas (plus,  I have a supply of empty sketchbooks that would make the local art supply store jealous.)  So, rather than draw on scraps and tape them in to a book as I'd done before, I began to draw on the pages of sketchbooks.  The erased lines create ghost layers that I really love and it encourages me to stay creative even when I don't have a specific project to work on.  That is the most important part, I believe...keep on keeping on.