My Neverending Sketchbook Story

A story of my relationship with Sketchbooks

Me and sketchbooks have a pretty rocky past. I mean, I don’t think it’s a mystery to anyone that artists, or creatives of any kind, can be pretty extra when it comes to some things. I’m no exception. Somethings in life I can shrug off and just be all “it is what it is.” Other things have me heading to tailor to get fitted for a custom straight jacket. Sketchbooks have always been one of those things that keep me on the brink of my own okayness.

When I first started drawing, it wasn’t in sketchbooks. It was on my dad’s yellow legal pads, that weird clay colored lined paper we all learned how to write on, and my favorite surface, the inside covers of coloring books. I didn’t care. If it was paper I’d draw on it.

As I got older and people realized I was a bit more than just a kid that doodles and more of an actual drawer, I started to get more serious art supplies for birthdays and Christmas. One of the first things was a sketchbook. Just a cheap, spiral bound sketchbook. But to me, a kid who had been trying to make masterpieces on shitty newsprint for years, this sketchbook might as well have been made of leathered angel skin and bound with stone forged from the same stone the tablets with all those rules Moses lugged down the mountain. It felt sacred and I felt scared.

Everything I had drawn before existed on its own. They were all pieces that lived free and unbound. Because of that, I could attack the paper and not care if I erased too much and ruined it. It could thrown away and no one would ever know, and soon even I’d forget. But this BOOK. This fucking bound book. Once you put the lines down, they’re there. For GOOD. Every line had to be ready to live the rest of its life in full view of whoever would look through this book that was quickly becoming my arch nemesis.

Eventually I was able to get over the fear and dive in. But I didn’t “sketch” in it. I that would be INSANE. I thought of every page as a finished work of art. I filled that book up with finished drawings of Bart Simpson As… fill in the blank. Like, Bart as Mike Tyson, Flavor Flav, MC Hammer, MC Serch, TMNT, and so on. I mean, I probably was the inventor of the concept of character mash-ups and didn’t even know it. But whatever. I filled the book up, but I coudn’t imagine doing that again.

The bound nature of sketchbooks would keep me from really practicing and working on the various aspects of illustration and cartooning. If it was in a book I felt it needed to be “finished” and so I spent years just trying to do pieces. As if I didn’t already have a problem, in my early 20’s, right before I broke into comics, I met Greg Titus. He fucked me up even more.

Greg was a young artist trying to make it in comics too. He was drawing an indy book a the time when I met him. He let me look through his “sketchbook.” I put quotes around it because it felt more like a “Fuck you, you’ll never achieve this level of artistic expression book.” Every page was a face melter. Pen, ink, paint, wires, parking tickets, bloody napkins, and anything else he wanted to turn into a mindblower. At this age, whenever you found something you liked, that’s the thing you were going to try to do or be. And now I REALLY had a sketchbook complex.

When I finally started getting comic book work, I started using sketchbooks to actually sketch in. Characters designs, cover and page thumbnails, etc. I've used and still use to this day, the spiral bound Canson sketchbooks as you can see, i’ve filled up a lot of them. Or mostly filled them up. I have a weird habit of leaving the tail end of books empty and moving on a fresh one. No idea what that’s about.

Every now and then one they years I’d think I was cured of my hardbound hangups and I’d buy a Moleskine like I’d see other artists have. I had dreams of blazing through the book, filling its pages and showing off my monumental accomplistment. Once I even declared that when I finished, I would publish copy of the book, exactly as it was. Ribbon and everything. I think that was around 2012 and I may have fille up 25% of it before placing on the shelf to live its unfulfilled life.

I still struggle with it today. Whether I called it a sketchbook, a journal, a sketch journal, I kick things off hot and heavy and before long I drift away. I think of all the books in the photo, one of them was completed. And that took nearly two years.

Now, one thing that allowed to be find a middle ground between “sketching” and “finished pieces” (whatever either of those mean) was deciding to put both hard and spiral bound books aside and start using loose sheets of paper. I thought if I was afraid to commit to drawings in a book because of the permanency, getting rid of the whole book thing might be answer. Turns out, it was.

That’s when Daily Sketches began. I had a stack of cardstock and a 3 ring binder and made my own “sketchbook” as I finished each page. I found myself feeling free enough to take a drawing all the way to finish, leave it have finished, turn a whole page into gesture drawings, thumbnails or layouts. Anything and everything was on the table.

Over the last several years as writing comics took over me drawing them, I’ve filled up less loose sheets and definitely found daily sketches turning into monthly if not quarterly. haha. But last week I watched a video about sketchbooks where the artist said he didn’t like books for the same reasons I’ve always had issues with them. So I pulled out stack of cardstock that has been collecting dust, put in my binder and put it in my backpack (which I take everywhere with me) and will try to get myself back in the habit filling up sheets again.

This was a very long winded way of saying that when it comes to drawing and sketching, there are no rules. Don’t think you have to make beautiful books that cover to cover, or think you have to do your sketching on loose sheets. Just draw. Whatever works for you, works for you. And as you can tell with my story, it never stops changing and retuning to where you started and then changing again, no matter where I am in my career. It’s all still just one big quest to figure out how to express ideas and be happy doing it.

I’ve been talking to Megan and John about getting back to creating some new YouTube content. I think some old sketchbook tours might be the way to ease back in. Stay tuned.