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
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
I really miss the “Book by Its Cover” blog, especially the series of posts about sketchbooks. (The blog has been inactive since 2015 but the archives are still viewable.) Here’s a cool post I’d flagged a few years ago: Book By Its Cover » Sketchbook Series: John Garcia. I love this shot of John’s pile … Continue reading John Garcia’s Sketchbooks
I spotted this in the New York Times Magazine of November 17, 2019. It is one of the saddest, most infuriating, most shameful notebook pages I’ve featured, as it was drawn by a young man who was incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and then ended up serving in the military … Continue reading Notebook Page from a Japanese Internment Camp
Architects create some of my favorite notebook and sketchbook pages. Here’s one I just loved, from a project by Smout Allen, a landscape architecture partnership. It’s scribbly and collage-y and I love the touches of color. Just gorgeous. See the original image and more description here: http://www.smoutallen.com/neo-natures-lanzarote
This is a really cool idea that I might have to try myself! Russell Stutler has been featured here before as a notebook addict. His website is a great resource for sketching inspiration, and he has done a deep dive testing popular pocket sketchbook brands, with Moleskine and Stillman and Birn among his favorites. But … Continue reading Russell Stutler’s Sketch Binder Notebook
A very powerful article from the September 16, 2019 New Yorker magazine: My Terezin Diary, by Zuzana Justman. It’s a miracle that the diary and its author both survived the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. I kept the diary from December 8, 1943, until March 4, 1944—the first winter of the two years I … Continue reading Zuzana Justman’s TerezÃn Diary
I must have missed this Brainpickings article when it was originally published in 2014, but I’m glad I discovered it via Pinterest! Artist John Vernon Lord created amazing illustrations to accompany James Joyce‘s Finnegans Wake in a collectible edition published by the Folio Society (now out of stock, alas). The illustrations are stunning, but of … Continue reading John Vernon Lord’s Notebooks