Entering The Sketchbook Project
Or, a journey from caring about how a sketchbook looks to just doing whatever and learning how to experiment and enjoy their experience.
The Sketchbook Project is a global storytelling initiative, inviting anyone to fill out a 5x7 sketchbook, with anyway they want, mail it back before a deadline, and have their sketchbook toured as part of a community of storytellers and artists. I joined the 18th volume… luckily they received it in time (I mailed it in 3 days before the deadline).
I learned about the project a couple years ago, but shied away from ever participating. At the time, sketchbooks held a very different meaning to me. They had to be “pretty", and there was a lot of pressure to make sure that I was filling my books with pleasing illustrations. So I was intimated by the project and never considered it. Fast forward to Christmas, 2020, and my dear friend Kari bought me a sketchbook for their digitized collection as a present. Which meant that IF I finished it and mailed it back by the deadline, it would be made available online for everyone to see. No pressure? Yikes! August 31st deadline…8 months? No problem! Or so I thought.
We started the project together. We figured it would be easier to fill the book if we stuck to a theme. I decided to focus mine on animals (of course), specifically on endangered species of Canada. It would be part beautiful drawings of animals and part education opportunity; advocating on behalf of familiar and unfamiliar species. My first couple pages I worked hard on, and I figured I had settled on a good look and feel for the sketchbook:
It would take an entire Saturday morning for me to research and create the two pages. I enjoyed the process, learned a lot, and fine tuned some pencil skills. However, I wouldn’t exactly call this experimenting. It was more of a life study, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’ve been trying to develop my style for years now, and move into something unique and unexpected. Advice I’ve been given in the past is to experiment, try new mediums, new approaches to drawing. But I found it hard to do so with this sketchbook. That intimidation and pressure to create something beautiful was very limiting.
And then I had to plan my wedding. Which ate up 4 months of that 8 month deadline. And I got a new job, which took a while for me to re-balance my work/life situation. Many evenings I ended the day too tired to really work on something beautiful and I would turn to my dollar store sketchbook to draw. It was here that my drawings felt more “more style” —whimsical, fun, full of personality.
Then I went down to the lake, sat on the beach and watched the birds. I finally tried out my ink markers and quickly sketched out this guy here.
It was here that I realized (really late, and I’m embarrassed how obvious) that different tools produced different results and simplicity is another tool that I could develop in my skill arsenal. Drawing animals didn’t have to mean an exact representation, as long as I tried to capture their movement, their uniqueness, that could be enough.
The last dozen pages of the sketchbook are messy. I scribble, make mistakes, draw with unforgiving pen and ink, throw in some watercolour… but I had the most fun with those pages. I also took the least amount of time. I finished the sketchbook in less than 2 weeks, literally pushing myself to fill pages. What I end up with is less of a beautiful, accurate, series of drawings of animals, and more of an expression of my journey in learning different ways to capture them.
In the end, what I really learned by completing the sketchbook project was to not take myself so seriously. Part of art, and learning and progressing and finding style, is making a mess.
You can learn more about The Sketchbook Project here. And hopefully, maybe in a few more weeks, you can check out my digitized sketchbook there as well. Try out the project yourself and see what happens from the start of your sketchbook to the end! It’ll be a ride.
