Friday Finds
This time of year always brings a rush of creative motivation with it. While a blank sketchbook page can be daunting, now is a great time to step out of your comfort zone by playing around with style and color or overcome artist’s block. Whether you’re taking classes, embarking on one of the many multi-day art challenges and prompt series circulating around social media, or just taking the time to reflect on your creative growth during these turbulent times, we hope that these illustrative sketchbooks offer inspiration.
How does framing impact the viewer’s experience with a work of art? This is the central question at the heart of Oleksandra Korobova’s sketchbook, “A Temporary Collection.” Each ink-based vignette captures a poignant memory, many of them from her grandmother’s life in Russia. Accenting each of these vibrant pages are a series of cut-outs designed to overlay these images. Mimicking frames on a wall, her sketchbook acts as a miniature gallery exhibition. Korobova runs the award-winning design studio Laska in Toronto, Canada and continues to illustrate, with a primary focus now on branding, web design, storyboards and vector art. You can keep up with Oleksandra’s latest projects on Instagram.
In his Volume 14 sketchbook, "MH-001,” Matt Hunsberger creates what he calls, “an exploration of advanced doodling.” With a graphic cartoon style, Hunsberger fills these pages with quirky characters, squishy blobs, and playfully vibrant monochromatic spreads. With so much pressure oftentimes placed on producing finished, fully-formed works of art, doodling can feel like a lost art. Yet Hunsberger’s sketchbook is a reminder that doodling is an important part of the creative process and a time to let your inner artist run free across the page. Hunsberger works as an artist and creative director in New Jersey. You can check out his work on Instagram, VSCO, and his website.
Tina Speece’s “Prompt-ly” is a great example of how the structure of prompts (either a single theme or a list) can help fuel artistic creation. Before embarking on her sketchbook, Speece created a list of prompts for herself, completed the list then revisited some of her concepts, ending up with a “Bizarre” themed collection of illustrations. Speece writes, “Stumbled a bit on what exactly to do, and [I] had to remind myself that a sketchbook's meant for throwing ideas into, not making a bunch of ‘completed’ pieces…Sometimes it's just better to go by association and figure out the logic later, than try to start with the logic.” Speece continues to work as an illustrator in Alabama. Her illustration projects take inspiration from film and television, pin-up, and one of her more recent projects is a series of monochromatic illustrations based on each month of the year. You can support her work by checking out her website, which includes her portfolio and shop, and following her on Instagram and Twitter.
Not every sketchbook, or the doodles that fill each page, need to follow a particular narrative or feature a specific subject. You can also incorporate experiments with abstraction into your sketchbook pages and creative prompts. Jeannine Ortiz’s 2017 sketchbook “patterns” is a great example of this approach. Each page features brightly-colored patterns, with doodles of creatures and critters blending into Ortiz’s organic forms. By using such a wide selection of colors, and punctuating her works with graphic line-work, Ortiz presents repetition as an act of reinvention. You can view more of her work on Flickr.
Selena Seifert’s 2012 sketchbook, “Along the Line,” turns observations of everyday beauty into a wonderful collection of doodles and illustrations. Many of the inked landscapes are taken from Seifert’s travels across the Australian Blue Mountain range. Selena writes, “It reflects the diversity of life we experience as an artist, where one minute we are drawing a nude figure to the next minute we are at a museum or on a crowed train or meeting room.” This medley of images, from botanical gardens to views outside of train windows, is a great example of spontaneous art-making and working through constraints of time and limited materials as you bring your sketchbook with you on travels. Selena Seifert is a mixed media artist who has worked on interactive public artworks, mosaics, and sculptures. When she’s not making work, she also works as an educator, leading workshops on ceramics, painting, and mosaic-making.
“Lolalilu’s Fantasy Field Guide,” a Volume 14 sketchbook by Molly Berry, is a wonderful catalog of creatures and cryptids from around the world! With Halloween right around the corner, and autumn bringing with it the chill of spooky stories, Berry’s bestiary-inspired book is a great flip-through for those looking to experiment in more fantasy and folklore-based artwork. Each whimsical illustration includes a wonderful description of the monster’s origin and the mythology behind its creepiness. Don’t be afraid to pull from history and myth, or even create your menagerie of beasts and magical characters! You can see more of Berry’s work on her Instagram and website.
