Sketchbook Contest

Cyndi at Layers and Layers is giving away an issue of Somerset Digital Studio for sharing pages from your sketchbook or art journal. She's going to draw one of the entry names. Are you going to enter?

Other people's sketchbooks are fascinating. I loved looking through my mom's college sketchbook. She was a glassblower, so it was fairly technical, but it was interspersed with "Vince's Lasagne Recipe", drawings of waves and birds, and all kinds of tidbits.

I thought I'd show some of my sketches and how my sketchbook has changed over the past few years.

(2005) Here is the finished version of the sketch above.

(2006-mid 2007) These entries were super organized. They always had the date finished, number of hours in the painting, a serial number, a value sketch, notes on inspiration behind the painting, experiments with a color palette and sometimes even the music I was listening to.

Finished piece below.

Sketch for a stamp I made this month. All kinds of odds and ends are infiltrating the sketchbook. Sometimes I draw with crayons just to de-clutter artistically.

Testing out the stamp. I don't have a finished piece yet. I put poems that mention rain over and below the stamp for fun.

Much of the planning stage now looks like chicken scratch. The sketch on the right was supposed to be a red, yellow and pink painting with strawberries for my kitchen. I folded chocolate into the paint when it was wet to get into the cooking mood. The finished painting looks nothing like my original plan. It's now blue and has a pine tree in it. I'll post it when I've got a photo. I feel an increasing need for freedom, so I don't plan so much anymore. I mostly rant, wonder and ponder in an art journal. So far my art journal is just for words.

My big goal this year is art focused. The last two years have been very marketing focused. I feel the need to stretch, learn, grow. So for good or bad, that means I'm ignoring proper documentation and all the good habits I used to have.