Sketchbook Pages

Here are some of my latest sketches and doodles. Sometimes meetings and phone calls are great times for me to get some mindless sketching done. It's a very difficult thing to just "sit down and sketch" something. Most times that is when the larger than life blank canvas screams back at you. In a sketchbook, pages should be screaming "mess me up, try something new" or something along those lines, but a lot of times my brain says "do something cool" or "just drawing anything," but anything can be very similar to nothing when nothing is consciously stirring around. Sketching while doing something else is wonderful because you get to access a portion of your subconscious thoughts. I've heard it described as daydreaming on paper and that's a great place to be.

Norman Rockwell had a wonderful approach to beginning a painting when he didn't have a firm direction. He would begin by drawing a lamppost somewhere on the page. It was a simple object that he could always draw and it would serve the purpose of 'jump starting' his brain. From this simple sketch, his paper was no longer CLEAN and he then freed himself to experiment in any direction. He would take this lamppost and draw something next to it and that would spark an idea. This would lead to another idea and so on and so forth, until he reached a solution he was happy to develop and paint. Leaving the simple lamppost far in the dust. Thanks Norman Rockwell, you've opened doors and paved paths that I'm sure we'll never quite see the end of.