It feels like a million years ago that I was in this space. And while I do feel the need to offer a little explanation for my lengthy absence, for right now, I’ll keep it short and sweet… Eye health issues sometimes derail even the best of intentions and always at the most inopportune times.
Sooooooo….Welcome to my reboot… and “Sketchbook Saturday”! This will be an ongoing series where each post will give you a peek into how my creative brain works (scary, I know!). I’ll be sharing content from different sketchbooks as well as a bit of info on media, inspiration, and process. My goal with this series and the blog itself, is as always, to share what I’m up to and hopefully inspire others to try something that they ‘ve never considered before! There’s no schedule for this but, it will always post on a Saturday. Onward…
All artists have “sketchbooks” of some kind. While I’ll typically draw on just about any scrap of paper I have lying around, I found out that I am kinda picky about the sketchbooks I use…makes no sense, right? I generally have several types of sketchbooks going at once because, well… I get bored easily! And, although I usually “think“ in graphite, colored pencils and/or gouache, I truly love to just play and explore different combinations of art media, subjects, styles, techniques, etc. Most of my books are a heavier weight paper because, I do tend to mix wet and dry media a lot, but I also have more than a few, smooth paper books for traditional sketching. Additionally, I discovered that I gravitate towards different shapes for different projects, but more about that in a future post. As of this moment in time, I currently have the following sketchbooks active…
One (or two…or three…) general sketchbooks
One for new media experiments
One for cataloging art media
One with surface pattern, holiday cards or party invitation ideas that I’m trying to flesh out
One that I have more polished surface pattern designs
One where I sketch thumbnails for a potential or active book project and…
One where I’m learning a new doodling-painting technique.
I do have another medium, where I tend to create a lot and that’s fiber art. This would include both traditional and not-so-traditional quilting, applique, embroidery, weaving, etc.
Up till now, I haven’t had a sketchbook for this area of creativity, only random pieces of paper scattered about, but… after recently losing a full color rendering of one of my finished applique designs (it’s in this studio, somewhere…) going forward, I definitely plan to start recording ALL future designs, regardless of the media, in a sketchbook!
Creatively Yours,
~Deb
If you ever have any questions about anything you see in this series or any other blog post, or even if you want to just say hi, feel free to post in the comment section below!
