Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his Pop Art comic book style works, so I was quite surprised to come across this page from one of his sketchbooks, which is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum. Not comic-y at all, these seem to be studies of perhaps architectural moldings and patterns. I was … Continue reading Roy Lichtenstein’s Sketchbook
I have a couple of Moleskine’s Japanese Albums, but I’ve never actually used one. The elongated spread of pages always seems daunting to me, but I love to see the way other artists take advantage of this format. American illustrator Chris Russell is one of the best I’ve seen. Large narrative paintings by seventeenth century … Continue reading Chris Russell’s Humanity Notebooks
This week’s addict shared these photos of her journals: Wow. I love all the intense patterns and color, which I think looks even better because of the standard shape and size of all the journals. Jacqueline is using a Dyan Reaveley Creative Dyalog standard TN cover that she painted, and made her own inserts featuring … Continue reading Notebook Addict of the Week: Jacqueline
A gallery in Long Beach, CA has an exhibition of sketchbooks, on view until March 20, 2020: The personal sketchbooks of more than 20 local artists will be on display at Flatline gallery, Saturday night. Unique to each artist, sketchbooks tend to be full of observational studies and jotted-down ideas; they’re candid representations of an … Continue reading The Sketchbook Show
The February 29th New York Times has a piece by Tess Taylor, talking about her pilgrimage to California, to visit as many places photographed by Dorothea Lange as she can. She also read Lange’s pocket notebooks, now archived at the Oakland Museum of California. Ms. Lange, best known for her Depression-era photographs of migrant laborers, … Continue reading Dorothea Lange’s Notebooks
I love getting tips from readers, and this is a really special one. (Thanks Matt!) Itsuo Kobayashi, a former Japanese soba chef born in 1962 … has recorded his meals in painstakingly detailed, hand-drawn food diaries of sorts for the past 32 years. In addition to recollections about taste, Kobayashi’s pen has accounted for every … Continue reading A Japanese Chef’s Notebooks
This is pretty inspiring: Sean Äaberg is an artist and game designer who had a stroke in late 2018. During his recovery over the following 16 months, he kept sketchbooks, re-learning how to draw day by day. His wife shares them in this video. Read more about him at Boing Boing: Artist Sean Äaberg’s stroke … Continue reading Sketching Through Stroke Recovery
Here’s some tips from a few artists about how to get yourself going with a sketchbooking (or notebooking) habit: Indian artists offer tips on how to start sketchbooking in 2020. I feel like my own sketchbook has been rather stagnant lately so I need to take some of these insights to heart! Mumbai-based artist Sameer … Continue reading How To Start Sketchbooking
As mentioned in a recent post about my daily carry notebooks, I’ve been using an extra Nolty diary to keep a scrapbook of interesting images, often artworks seen in the newspaper or a magazine, or sometimes just random clippings and bits of washi tape. A couple people have asked if I print out online images, … Continue reading 2019 Image Diary
A reader tipped me off to what looks like a really interesting book: In this richly illustrated book, readers will for the first time experience the diaries David Sedaris has kept for nearly 40 years in the elaborate, three-dimensional, collaged style of the originals. A celebration of the unexpected in the everyday, the beautiful and … Continue reading David Sedaris’s Diaries