Forget Perfect: How a Simple Sketchbook Can Restart Your Art Practice
You've started the year with the goal to create more art. You head to Blick and fill your basket with paints, mediums, brushes, and panels. Back home, you have all your art books stacked on the coffee table and three open tabs on your computer, each with an in-progress online class. Whenever you open Pinterest or Instagram, you save images you plan to look at later for inspiration. The ideas are churning, the excitement is building... and then your job/life/kids/family again become the priority. Making art seems like work and something you don't have time for. The panels and your good intentions are moldering in the corner.
Let's rethink this plan.
A completed work of art doesn't have to be a 24" x 24" work on a panel. You don't have to show your work to anyone or make only gallery-ready pieces.
This is my reminder to you of the power of a sketchbook. I have two shows this year and need to make those gallery-ready pieces. However, the downside is that I have less time to play and experiment. I'm reinstituting my sketchbook as a play place.
Materials:
12" x 9" Strathmore Visual Journal- spiral bound with watercolor paper
Small scissors (with a blade cover). I like these Cutter Bee scissors
The best glue sticks I've ever used- Gloo sticks
An envelope with small pieces of paper- not full sheets. Look to your scraps and pull out your favorites
Deli paper or pages from a magazine to use as a glue surface
Pencil for dating each piece
I keep the supplies in a zippered pencil case, and the envelope of collage papers paper clipped into the sketchbook.
Process:
Keep the materials out where you can see them
Find 5-10 minutes each day to make something
That's it. I do not expect anything to be good, to inspire more art, or ever be seen. I want a place to play, and this is where I'll do that. The grid in the image above was made while I watched TV with my son. I think it took me 20 minutes. I dated the collage in the margin and titled it "Another TV Grid."
Make lots of art plans for this year, but also make plans to play and create small works of art.