Sketchbooks - inspiration

"To spend time observing, without drawing,

Thinking without drawing, or

Feeling without drawing

 is the misfortune of non-artists"

paul Felix

Your Sketchbook is your Playground.

This is where you can be purely you - thats why it is so important to be disciplined in  keeping a sketch book - you don't want to forget this.  your Sketchbook is what keeps you alive, motivated, and enjoying drawing when a life of deadlines and stress seem determined to stamp it out of you.  

There are many ways and reasons to keep a sketchbook - exactly what purpose it serves will be completely unique to you.  Here are a few key points though:

Pictorial Ideas

Increasing Visual Memory

Living in the Moment

A moment of Enlightenment

Pictorial Ideas – taking your own ideas and making them tangible – unrestricted Imagination.

                  - Cezanne used his sketchboot to “preserve and protect his inward life”

"We draw to find our own originality.” Peter Steinhart

Increasing Visual Memory:

“In some ways, the mind of a ainter should be like a mirror that is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.” Leonardo Da vinci

"I don't get ideas... I have them" - Brad Holland

Living in the Moment – Catching small details in life – a sweeping scarf, a pointed nose

“cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Sotre up in the mind without ceasing a continuous stream of observations from which to make a selection later.” - John Singer Sargent

A moment of Enlightenment –

 “If you havn't been a note taker – become one. Hundreds of potentially fertile ideas have drifted through your conciousness and have spun out into oblivion to be lost forever” - Walter Stanchfield