SKETCHbook

Since my teen years a constant must have for me is my sketchbook. Stuffing my sketchbook in my backpack before I leave home is as much of a daily habit as getting dressed in the morning. Which one I throw in is anyone’s guess as I have amassed a hell of a lot, if I see a sketchbook I like I can’t help myself.

Over the years I feel like it has developed into a strange fetish-like obsession with sketchbooks, any city I travel to I will instinctively look for an art supply store to buy a sketchbook to add to the collection. The amount of blank pages I have at my disposal borders on the ridiculous. Some people collect paintings, others figures, books or whatever else they form that bond with, my collection of choice (one of them anyway) is sketchbooks. That obsession however kicks my OCD into overdrive. One misplaced stroke, One drawing that’s a little too messy, erased one too many times or hell, I’m just having one of those days that no matter what I draw it just seems to come out as a steaming pile of hot trash, my first instinct is to tear out the page. For the sake of the rest of the sketchbook just rip it out, remove that infected page before it spreads to the rest of them. That is the best-case scenario, I’ve left many sketchbooks unfinished just because the more I progressed through it, the more those early pages, filled with sketches from weeks or months before seemed as if they were somehow ruining the overall aesthetic of the book. Whether it was because when I started that first page I was focusing on birds and 2 months later I had taken on new influences and was drawing girls faces or sometimes it was just a matter of looking back and despising those drawings from months ago, whatever the reason, many half-filled sketchbooks have been condemned to sketchbook purgatory. The box at the bottom of my wardrobe.

It was through this obsession and the collection of sketchbooks that I had forgotten the fact that a sketchbook is first and foremost, a tool. When that first glimmer of inspiration hits, before its even a fully formed idea, that pencil should already be feverishly scribbling on that fresh page. When you’re suffering from the dreaded creative block, you can usually find the remedy in filling page after page of your sketchbook with the most atrociously rubbish sketches until finally, that spark reignites and from the ashes of some of the worst you have to offer artistically, a half decent idea rises. One of the main things I’ve come to realise about sketchbooks though, they tell our story as artists. The reason I hate those sketches at the start of a sketchbook is because I have progressed, yet I owe my progression to those early sketches. Now thinking back on all those pages torn out and tossed away, how many pages of my story have I discarded without a second thought.

It’s because of this that I have vowed to never tear out another page or leave another sketchbook unfinished.