Happy November! I wanted to go a bit more in-depth (if you came here from my newsletter thank you and if not, you can sign up here if you’d like!) about my thoughts and feelings around sketchbooks and sketchbook pressure! I’m not sure if I made this up but I feel so much pressure to make my sketchbook beautiful and cohesive. I see so many wonderful illustrators that seem to have such polished sketchbooks, I don’t understand how they do it. It’s almost scared me off using my sketchbooks, which is not fun at all.
I want my sketchbook to be a place where I can experiment and have fun! I’m sure a lot of people will already know of Fran Meneses and her ‘ugly’ sketchbooks, but I found this concept super inspiring and have been trying to implement this kind of thought process in my own work!
So now I’m going to bite the bullet and share some of my own sketchbook work here, as a form of exposure therapy maybe 😂. There’s some messy sketches and a couple little gouache paintings. I’ll be interested to see how it changes next month, I’m going to try really hard to be less afraid of making ‘bad’ art. (There’s no such thing of course but it’s all subjective isn’t it.)
I’m not sure if any of my ramblings made sense or related to anyone but I’m happy to have created a place to share some less finished pieces and have a goal to share some every month here and/or in the Newsletter!
A x