A Little More Sketchbook Tour
This sketchbook, filled between May 2021 and October 2022, was a huge part in developing my current art style. This is where I really got into color. I experimented with mixed media, some pages even have hair dye smeared on them. I drew what I wanted, not what I thought was technical or artistic enough. I shed my fear of the blank page and let loose.
As in many sketchbooks, most pages aren't that special, they are for practice drafts and testing. Here is a collection of the biggest developments I made in this book, if you would like to see the whole thing, check out this YouTube video.
Stars as Clowns
This is when I started drawing stars personified. The backgrounds on these pages are left over paint from larger paintings. This page marks my discovery of neon acrylics. As well as this acrylic liner, a tube, sort of like puffy paint, of heavy body acrylic. It can be hard to work with as the tip clogs often, but when it corporates it gives an amazing raised line art. I love texture in art. Since then I have created a number of works centered around texture and more tactile mediums, using sequins, embroidery and other embellishments like metal studs and keyboard bits glued onto paintings. I still want to flesh that concept out into a full series of fully tactile paintings, for the sensory seeker in myself.
Pigeons and Eyes my Beloveds
I love pigeons. I have always loved bird watching. Around this time I went from living in a rural area, seeing blue jays, cardinals, and chickadees everywhere to a city where any bird other than starlings, cowbirds, and pigeons were a rare sight. This transition was quite jarring to me. But I found the same beauty in the common pigeon that I have always seen in my favorite bird, the mourning dove. I could go on a long tangent about how pigeons have been slighted, snubbed even, by the human race, but maybe another time.
These eyes on the right hand page have become a repetitive motif in my art style. Long clumped and pointed eyelashes, and droopy exaggerated eye bags. When I was in a basics of digital art class the professor called me out, as art teachers often do, while we were sharing pieces. He said that my ‘overuse’ of eyes showed a struggle with identity and that perhaps I didn't know who I was. Yes I was having a bit of a crisis at the time, but he didn't have to say that in front of the whole class.
Pulling People out of my Brain
This was the first moment that I felt confident in my abilities as an artist. I had never felt too great about how I drew faces and rendered people. In the months leading up to this page I had been drawing people a lot more, referencing models on pinterest, my friends' instagram posts, and even just drawing strangers in the park while people watching. This was a major milestone for me, a switch flipped in my brain. From the mindset of ‘uuh I’m just not good at this I don't have the talent’, to ‘huh, I guess it really is a skill you have to practice’. And you really do have to keep practicing it. I can say this because I have not practiced drawing people much at all in the past year or so, and I have absolutely slid backwards in this skill.
Major Arcana Death Concept Art
This page was the sketching and research process for the first painting in my major arcana series (still unfinished at this time). Death was the first tarot card I decided to work with, listed on the right are the interpretations of the card. Rebirth, endings and beginnings, sense of self awareness, letting go, profound change. Across the page are my renderings of imagery most commonly associated with the card. Corvids, skulls, moths, fungi and other agents of decay. The most common, or at least the Rider Waite interpretation of the death card is the ferryman on the river Styx, which I believe I did cover in the sketching process but not in this book. This is the Ideal sketchbook page to me. It is raw, but recognizable, an exploration of a larger concept. It's not a smaller copy of the final piece or even a first draft, but it shows the process, it points in the direction of the larger painting.
New Vs Old Art Styles
It's almost surreal for these pages to have ended up next to each other. On the right is a re-visitation of what I would have considered my art style in high school. All black and red, skeletons, skulls, bones and anger. It's apparent what an awful headspace I was in at the time. And on the left, bright colors, patterns, still some doodles of skulls at the bottom of the page, but much more joy is present. This shows growth, in much more than my art practice, but as a human, allowing myself to enjoy things freely. Stepping outside of aesthetic boxes and intellectual expectations for myself and my art.
