Expressive Sketchbooks: Developing Creative Skills, Courage, and Confidence

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Expressive Sketchbooks shares a host of creative ideas and prompts, tools and techniques, methods for working around obstacles and barriers, and tons of visual inspiration to help you grow in your sketchbooking practice.

An expressive sketchbook is a place for you to explore, express, and enjoy your own innate creativity on your own terms. It is a safe playground for the imagination—a place to mess about, play, and experiment—and to gain confidence in your abilities as you develop your skills.

Expressive Sketchbooks offers techniques and creative exercises that incorporate mark making, watercolor, mixed media, collage, words and text, and more. It unpacks some of the obstacles and barriers that you may face along the way and offers wisdom and encouragement to help you decide why and how to start your sketchbook and how to develop and expand your artistic practice.

This book is packed with ideas and exercises, including:Exploratory drawing exercisesHow to utilize color in your sketchbookHow to create dynamic and varied sketchbook pagesHow to find inspiration in nature and in your everyday lifeWays to mix media and art suppliesWays to kickstart your creativityHow to find and develop a process that feels personal to youThrough this book, you’ll find out what lights you up, what makes you curious and fascinated, and what makes you expansive. Discover how to magnify your creativity and enliven your art skills by using an expressive sketchbook as your daily companion.

From the Publisher

Expressive Sketchbooks: Developing Creative Skills, Courage, and Confidence

WHAT IS AN EXPRESSIVE SKETCHBOOK?

An expressive sketchbook is a playground for your imagination—a place to nurture your creativity and develop your own artistic style. In this book, I provide lots of guideposts to light your way and help you develop a sketchbook that feels uniquely yours. This book is about exploring your call to create and coaxing those ideas out onto the page. It is about helping you make art that only you can create.

MAGIC AND MOTIVATION

Why develop your own sketchbook practice? Keeping a sketchbook will help you cultivate your own self-expression and creativity. This chapter is designed to help you unpack any obstacles and barriers that may be blocking your creativity. It will also help you understand your reason for starting a sketchbook and what you’d like your sketchbook to be. Look for tips on ways in which you can reflect upon and document your artistic interests and inspirations.

GETTING GOING

This chapter provides everything you need to get started in your sketchbook. It invites you to consider the type of sketchbook that best suits you and the various materials you can use. The variety of exercises are designed so that you can use them as jumping-off points and then adapt them to your own style.

TECHNIQUES FOR EXPLORING AND EXPERIMENTING

This section contains a host of practical techniques that I use when making art. I explain different methods to explore and experiment, and share ways in which you can be inventive with mixing art materials. My hope is that you apply, adapt, and alter these techniques to use the art supplies you have.

GROWING YOUR IDEAS

Now it’s time to take the practical tools and techniques you’ve learned in previous chapters and expand upon them. Begin with a theme or topic that fascinates you and experiment!

PRACTICE AND PROGRESS

You’ve tackled the techniques and learned how to dream up creative pages in your sketchbook that are a unique reflection of you. Now it’s time to learn what may be the most important part of the process: how to maintain your expressive sketchbook routine and incorporate art into your life for the long term. Here are a few ideas for ways you can overcome common pitfalls and nurture your artistic practice thoughtfully and with a kind heart.

THE JOY OF DRAWING

Ways to Start Drawing

There is an energy and vibrancy about a quick drawing, an off-the-cuff quality that can be very liberating. A speedy drawing can have a certain beauty and an immediacy. When you practice quick drawing, try drawing several images on one page or do one drawing over and over again. Approach the same drawing with a variety of art tools, such as a pencil or thick felt-tip pen. If you haven’t drawn in many years, you may feel reticent to start. I am cheering for you! I encourage you to take action, dive in, and start drawing. The following are simple exercises to try on your subject of choice. They are designed so you have the freedom to experiment with them and make them your own.

Don’t Look at the Page

This is a super-quick exercise in which you draw the object without looking at the page. Instead, focus on your subject matter. Don’t let your pencil or pen leave the page—it should follow your eyes as you look at the contours and outlines of the object. Your drawing may look weird and distorted at first, but this technique helps to free you up, allowing you to really examine and understand what you are drawing, and not worry about the end result. You can’t be too precious about a drawing if you’re not allowed to even look at the page as you draw. The drawing can capture the essence of your subject and create an interesting starting point that you may add to and develop or leave just as it is.

Draw the Space Around the Object

It is useful to think about the area around your subject—the negative space. We often assume we know what a certain object looks like, so we draw how we think it looks rather than what we actually see. Drawing the space around the object is one way to capture its true form. By drawing the space around the object instead of the object itself, you bypass your assumptions. You are not drawing the thing, you are drawing the space that the thing sits in, which encourages you to draw from observation rather than assumption.

Timed Sketches

Setting time limits can be particularly helpful when getting started. Because you only allow yourself a limited amount of time, this technique takes the pressure off. The lower the expectations, the freer and more expressive you

become. Draw the same subject with different time limits and then compare each drawing. Try the following:

1 minute5 minutes20 minutes1 hour

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quarry Books
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 14, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 163159835X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1631598357
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.33 x 11 inches
Grade level ‏ : ‎ Preschool and up
Best Sellers Rank: #238,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #121 in Mixed Media (Books) #380 in Pen & Ink Drawing #656 in Creativity (Books)
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