05/11/2020: Sketchbooks in relation to my practice.

 

The sketchbook is is the humble beginning to any great project. Within my own practice, a sketchbook allows me to document the natural world. I really enjoy taking this journalistic approach when creating work in my sketchbook and it soon becomes this little space of curiosities. I also very often record information about the thing I am drawing. This can either be through observations or research from books. 

Here are some of my sketchbooks that I regularly use to document nature:



I would love to sit down and talk you through each one but with the current situation we are in, that simply is not possible. So instead I have photographed a few of the pages to demonstrate the kind of things I use a sketchbook for:







I find looking through other artist's sketchbooks to be really inspiring. Recently I have been looking through the sketchbooks of William Turner at the bleak gloomy landscapes he paints. Here are a few examples found in the Tate online archive:




Another artist who was introduced to me in the second year was Emily Sutton. Her work really resonates with me and I find her sketchbooks to be particularly fascinating. I really like the way in which she uses her sketchbook to make detailed notes on reality and the plethora of interests she has. Here is an example:



Thinking about the humble sketchbook reminds me of the very first project undertaken as part of my degree - the first concertina book  summer project. The brief was to create a 30 page concertina that reflected our interest as an illustrator and showcased something we did over summer. I spend a lot of time in nature drawing so I decided for my project I was going to illustrate 30 things I saw in nature over the summer break. It really reminds me that nature journaling is what I enjoy doing and forms a large part of my personal practice. Here are some images from that project.




I am going to be regularly updating this blog with sketchbook pages as I feel that it is the most fundamental part of and project and allows me to document my thought process.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

18/05/2021: Final artwork for Nature explorers book.

Image
 Below is all of the final artwork for my children's book 'Nature Explorers'. The book separates different habitats as the viewer delves into the wild life that is associated with each location. The book features a combination of digital and traditional collage - the entire image making process has been fully documented on my blog. For now I have added Lorem Ipsum to demonstrate where I have considered placing the text. I plan on writing the text for this book, along with the left over pages, post submission in preparation for the degree show. Stand alone images without text: Woodland section: Meadow section: Farmland section: Coastal section: Endpapers: Cover:
Read more

12/05/2021: Bees (page 13).

Image
Below is the rough design for the bee spread I am working on. My idea behind this piece was that I wanted to feature bees and their hive amongst an apple tree which I collaged as part of my work in the authorship unit. With it being one of my more successful collage works, I really wanted an opportunity to use it in this book Below is the final image. I really like how this page spread turned out. I like the texture and the colours and think it is visually exciting
Read more

14/05/2021: Inside barn(page 6).

Image
Below is the design for the barn spread. For this page I wanted to show all the insects that live in the damp dark conditions in a barn within a farm habitat Below is the final art work for this spread. I decided to replace the spiders with more moths as I really liked the design of the collaged moths and thought they would stand out better on the dark background as opposed to how the spiders would look.
Read more