On Sketchbooking
I was thinking about the three main steps of making a linocut print,
Designing the image
Carving the lino
Printing the picture
All three are important, and all three are necessary (unless you’re maybe channeling the Surrealists and doing some sort of “automatic carving” thing). But all three are also very different and for me the most important step, and the most creative, is the first - designing the image.
For the record, I’m not going to try and define “creativity” here. That’s another post. Let it mean for you whatever it means, and I’ll let it mean for me whatever it means for me. Maybe the same, maybe different. All good.
The first step is the most important because without an image, there’s nothing to carve and no picture to print. It’s the most creative because…possibilities. Where do you even start, or maybe more precisely, where don’t you start?
I see so much great artwork every day - and so much of it, even some of the stuff I like best, I don’t want to make.
I might know more about what kind of artist I’m not than about what kind or artist I am. Trying to figure out that second part is where the sketchbook comes in. I have hundreds of sketches of possible prints, dozens of drawings of the same thing over and over again, and page after page of exploratory scribbles (not to mention cafe sketches, plain air doodles and drawings of D&D characters). Sketchbooks are the original “safe space” - and my most creative space. There’s room for anything in a sketchbook and there is no such thing as a “bad drawing” in a sketchbook.
In fact, a sketchbook without bad drawings isn’t, for me, a proper sketchbook.
Sketchbooks should be full of bad drawings because they’re where you learn how to draw (make, sketch, paint, collage, etc.) things that you’ve never drawn before. Sketchbooks are where you stretch, mess up, copy other artists, excavate ideas, iterate on compositions and basically just try out anything and everything. In your sketchbooks you’ll figure out what kinds of things you’re good at, which kinds you suck at and which kinds you care about.
I’ve never drawn a good portrait in my life. I’m okay with that. I still try sometimes though - and those are sketches that I don’t show people.
There’s a bit of a fetishisation with sketchbooks, and I’m guilty of it myself. I love to look at artist sketchbooks and I’m nervous about showing mine. I don’t want people to see the bad drawings, only the good ones….even though I know the good ones wouldn’t happen without the bad. What if I could be the artist who only ever draws well?
I’m not. So enjoy a few pages, some I like, others…well, let’s just imagine what they’ll look like when I try again.
