Finishing a Couple of Sketchbooks

I’ve had a few sketchbooks in various stages of completion for a couple of years, and I just put two of them to bed. One was a Moleskine sketchbook that I used almost entirely for lunchtime sketches while sitting in parks in NYC– mostly quick pencil sketches, with watercolors added to a few later. After a few months, I ended up taking the sketchbook with me on trips to Arizona and the beach in Delaware. Here’s a few favorite pages:

my sketchbooks3my sketchbooks5my sketchbooks4my sketchbooks6my sketchbooks7my sketchbooks8my sketchbooks9

This other sketchbook, a HandBook Artist Journal, was started on my first trip to Paris. I think I was a bit intimidated by the artistic heritage of Paris, or perhaps by feeling it was a bit of a cliche to sit around sketching in a small notebook in Paris! (At least it wasn’t a Moleskine.) I only used a few pages in Paris,  after which it just became a receptacle for weekend doodles, sketches and collages, most of them pretty lame… it was good to just play around and see what I come up with, but I’m much better at just drawing things that are in front of me.

my sketchbooks12my sketchbooks1my sketchbooks2my sketchbooks11

 

After finishing these, I’ll be on to more of the same! A fresh Moleskine sketchbook, and another half-started HandBook that I first used for a few not very good drawings on trips to Istanbul and Lisbon, and then in Corsica, where all I drew was a few ridiculous caricatures of the people I was traveling with. Now it will be my new weekend doodle and collage book. I’m always trying to force myself to keep drawing and doodling and creating something– anything– even if I’m not always pleased with the results.

6 thoughts on “Finishing a Couple of Sketchbooks”

  1. Istanbul, Lisbon, Paris….you’ve taken some really cool trips. I’ve visited Paris twice and I hated getting out a notebook in public. I don’t sketch, just write, but I’d save it for the hotel because I felt like such a walking cliche.

    Although I read recently that Hemingway is being forgotten in Paris by the younger generation. (I think I read it at the BBC website) soon it will be safe to sit in a cafe scribbling in a notebook without hearing snickers.

  2. Congratulations on completing two more sketchbooks…..nice sketches too. I’m trying to form a collection of completed sketchbooks rather than having numerous incomplete ones.

  3. I love seeing your sketches! More, please. Very disciplined of you to go back and fill in those old notebooks. My temptation is to always start a new one.

  4. The cityscape in the second photo of HandBook is beautiful!! What pen/colored pencil(/paint?) did you use for it?

  5. Thanks Demian! If I remember correctly, I used water-soluble colored pencils for the background, and a brush-tip marker, either Faber-Castell or Pigma, to draw the buildings.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.