Tips 5 & 6

Tip number 5. Buy a notebook and keep it on you

From doing Art & Design in school, I now have this constant underlined nagging pressure to make my work ‘perfect’. By perfect I mean, introducing my book with a title page, spider maps then artist research. This is not the ONLY way of doing a sketchbook. When I did my Foundation year I started to understand that this is known to others as the ‘GCSE/A Level’ style of working.

Your sketchbook is YOURS to keep and work in as you please. No one is going to be assessing your mind map skills or judging your ability to glue in a straight line so go wild. Use your sketchbook as an experimentation of everything you’ve wanted to do before but you hadn’t done due to restrictions on your course. Illustrate, paint, glue in found objects, rip and crumble your pages, work with different medias and fabrics, jot down overheard conversations, draw an object then turn your page 90 degrees and draw another overlapping them until your page is full, create marks using strange things and record what you used, tie a pen to your finger and hang it above your sketchbook while you’re in a car to ‘record your journey’, try monoprinting, stitch into your page, collage, etch.. The list is endless.

Just think of your sketchbook as an exciting experiment and change this mind-set that it needs to be too ‘perfect’ because half the time, the best works come from when you are fully in the moment.

I’ve currently been using the moleskine a4 art book as my new sketchbook and I love it! It can sustain itself even while I’m using my thick paint Posca markers and it doesn’t seep through the page.

Good paper is important. You will later find out what works for you but I personally like the Pink Pig sketchbooks and the Moleskine hard cover sketchbooks.

Tip number 6. Keep a logbook

Not so much as a 'journal' but small details on what happened during the day. Who you met, what you saw, what you ate etc. Quirky little things that may be relevant at a different time.

Below, I have inserted Kleon's example of his 'logbook'. See his website for more tips on this!

Hope you are still enjoying my tips on how to stay creatively inspired. Keep your eyes peeled for the last two additions to this next week and in the mean time why not get creating???