Sketchbook Pages: Inspiration and Ideas

I have been creating sketchbook pages for years, and I wanted to share some of my techniques and inspiration with you as fuel for your sketchbook. If you are new to the sketchbooking world, a sketchbook is just any sort of blank book (ranging from spiral notecards to large books of high-grade paper) that a person transforms into a sort of visual diary. Other people’s sketchbook pages fascinate me, as do my own from the past. As a fair warning, in a few years you may look back at some of your pages and cringe (what was I thinking?!), but others you will be glad you created. There are a couple of books that strongly inspired me as I created my sketchbooks: Sabrina Ward Harrison’s Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself and Lynne Perrella’s Artists’ Journals and Sketchbooks: Exploring and Creating Personal Pages. Both influenced me in different ways; I appreciate Sabrina Ward Harrison’s openness and ability to spread feeling on a page. Lynne Perrella’s work is a compilation of different artists’ pages, along with a few how-tos such as ink transfers and binding techniques. My own sketchbook pages reflect different methods I become obsessed with (e.g. stamping, drawing photos) and feelings. I hope that they will be valuable to you as inspiration for your own sketchbook pages! This sketchbook page aims to capture a moment in time. It’s a pen and watercolor drawing of my grandparents’ kitchen in Denver. I recall pleasant memories when I look at this page. I used a gel pen to create this, and the pleasant gray tones were achieved simply by painting water over the ink. The ink merges on its own accord with the water. Light watercolor was used for the other tones.

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