Sketchbook adventures

Sketchbooks are something that I struggled with for a very long time. These days, I tend to use them more as a cross between a scrapbook and a journal. I document my reflections, print off my work as photos and paste them in and reflect on how I feel about topics that may enter my work, whether they should or if they have no place. My sketchbooks are a place of contemplation and they document my thoughts and processes.

I have long been the kind of creative that doesn't see the point in endless iterations, constant rehearsals, prep sketches etc. It seems like an overhang from a traditional arts education. It is a one size fits all way of funnelling students to work in a particular way. I like to work spontaneously and not feel constrained or contained by the pages of a book when I am creating. I prefer a canvas, a found substrate or a piece of paper. Just looking at 'final' pieces can help artists to join the dots of their work and to see the threads of their personal voice. My experimentation happens there, not in a book.

For a long time I railed against sketchbooks and did not see the point of them, I felt resentful that as an artist I was 'supposed' to use them in a particular way. In fact, I was more passionately against them than I was for them.

They are more of an 'evil' that I live with these days. I wouldn't even say a 'necessary evil' as I do not consider them to be a necessity and could easily work without one at all and just process everything in a notebook, in words.

Methods have changed over the years and what once may have started out as a sketch or a prep drawing for an artist 100 years ago, now may take place on on a screen of some kind. A sketchbook may now be a collection of files or images. I feel strongly that had artists of the past had such readily available access to photographs, they would have made more use of them to work from rather than having to sketch everything laboriously. Sometimes it is more about looking at ideas and words and connections for me, not a series of sketches. I only need to read a sentence of my notes and I am taken straight to my mental images of that idea.

Sketchbooks can be anything you want - digital, physical or not at all. What works for you?