Well, I want to talk about letting a sketchbook evolve today. One of the most interesting things about being an artist is when you start a particular type of sketchbook, only to end up with something ridiculously different months or years later. This usually happens because your interests change, you begin to refine the original idea for the sketchbook etc… And it’s really fascinating. Just like how an artist’s “style” or their artistic process evolves naturally through practical use, it’s fascinating how this can happen with sketchbooks too.
This was something I ended up thinking about in early-mid December last year a few days after beginning the fourth volume of my other sketchbook. Although there were some other precursors – a couple of pieces of “Bioshock Infinite” (2013) fan art that I made in December 2022, a piece of ballpoint pen artwork I made on the 2nd February 2023 etc… What really made me start an additional sketchbook was messing around with an A.I. image generator in January-February 2022.
Yes, this program was an absolute technical marvel – but I compared the pictures it made to my original human-made artwork and I felt like a total failure in comparison. It shook my confidence in my own art really badly. So, I decided that I needed to practice more and to find a way to make the practice more fun than using an A.I. as well. I was also fascinated by ballpoint pen artwork at the same time. So, on the 9th February 2023. I began a small A6-sized sketchbook which I could use to make quick fan art using ballpoint pens.
As someone who had spent the previous decade or so doggedly making original art about 95-99% of the time, there was something liberating about actually being like the “cool artists” on the internet and making art based on my favourite movies, games, TV shows etc… Not only that, using a ballpoint pen for the artwork both sped it up a bit (in combination with the smaller page size) and also gave me a fun artistic challenge which demanded my total attention and focus as well 🙂
But, by the end of the first sketchbook, I was starting to feel the limits of ballpoint pen artwork. So, I chose a small 9cmx 14cm watercolour sketchbook with a yellow cover for the second volume. I’d originally planned to stick to limited palette paintings, but I quickly found myself not only making “ordinary” watercolour fan art paintings but also – like with my original art – scanning them and editing them on my computer as well. And this worked really well… until I started to run out of things to paint.
Eventually, I decided to focus less on painting well-known films and games and to focus a lot more heavily on painting stuff which I enjoyed more frequently – such as Youtube videos and stuff like that. This focus on less “famous” media continued into the third volume of the sketchbook – which also had a snazzy reflective gold cover. But I also noticed myself experimenting with making original art using this smaller painting size – which eventually led to me switching to a smaller format for my main “original art” sketchbook in August 2023 [Edit: Although, due to scheduling, art using the new format won’t show up here until much later this year].
Later into the third volume, I noticed that I was making less fan art and focusing slightly more on making more personal and introspective artwork. Descriptions and paintings of moods and feelings, of my metaphysical beliefs, of my personal humour, of more of my daydreams etc… It was almost more like a diary in some ways.
Then, when I started my fourth sketchbook – another golden one – on the 8th-9th December 2023, it went even more heavily in this direction. Out of the seven paintings in there at the time of writing, two are fan art pieces and five are introspective ones (including three two-panel comics). So far, there’s also much more of a LGBT theme to it than the previous three sketchbooks. And I’m having an absolute whale of a time with it 🙂 It’s like finding something MEANINGFUL, like my own personal version of something like Winston Rowntree’s excellent “Subnormality” webcomic and like a sort of “sanctuary” where I could just make art for myself without caring what other people thought.
Back in early December last year, I randomly found myself binge-watching a Youtube channel which focused on traditional Chinese-style tea-making. Unlike the typical British “teabag and electric kettle” approach, one of the interesting things about Chinese-style tea-making is that the very first cup of tea made with some tea leaves is actually poured out into a tray rather than drunk. This is apparently because the leaves need a bit of time to “open up” and begin to infuse properly. The first cup isn’t as good as the others. Likewise, this tea-making process also focuses on making lots of smaller cups of tea from the same leaves, which allows the flavour to develop from cup to cup.
And, well, this seemed like the perfect metaphor for so many artistic things. Whether it is how your art style evolves over time, whether it is how the quality of your art improves with practice or whether it is how you can start a sketchbook expecting to focus on one type of art and end up somewhere completely different – but better – sometime later.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
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