My Advice on Making Your sketchbook “aesthetically pleasing “
Do you ever look at your sketchbook and think to yourself, “why doesn’t my sketchbook look aesthetically pleasing?”
You know what they say, "you are your biggest critic". I think something we do naturally as evolved human beings, is criticize ourselves. A lot. I do not know if self-criticism existed at the beginning of humanity or if it's a learned or innate trait, but if social media existed during the stone ages, could you imagine how that would make the cave dwellers feel? "Oh my god, our cave doesn't have a painting as good as the Flintstones cave!" But we do criticize ourselves, we do it all the time, whether it's about how we look (that's a big one, I know), what we're doing, how we're living, and the list goes on and on and on. With the intense rise of short form media where everyone is sharing photos of themselves looking great, or sharing the amazing work that they produce, or posting how they're living lavishly, it makes it even easier to compare and criticize ourselves for what we don't have or what we haven't yet achieved. This is an issue that's been going on in my life and I am going to squash that kind of attitude towards things, now that I'm in my 20's. But I find that this affects me most when it comes to my art - especially my sketchbook. Have you seen what some artist's sketchbooks look like? I've seen so many sketchbooks where each page is literally a work of art, and it looks amazing. Which begs the question, "why doesn't mine look like that and how can I get it to look like that?" I'd ask myself these questions all the time in my late teenage years. I'd start a painting where I felt like I knew exactly how it would look and I felt it in my gut that it was going to be an Instagrammable piece of work. This kind of thinking went on for a long time and it affected me a lot because I never understood why I couldn't paint in my sketchbook the way other artists would on social media. They'd flip through their pages, and it was filled with beautiful and vibrant art. Well, the reality is, is that my sketchbook didn't need to be "perfect", nor did it need to be filled with "art" that people "needed" to see. In fact, my sketchbook didn't have to include drawings at all because the purpose of the sketchbook is to serve as a second home to your creative mind. This is what I learned in my early 20's that really healed a lot of the frustrations I dealt with in my teens. I guess it helped that I wasn't a full time university student juggling a part time job and that getting good grades in elementary school and high school was my job. All I can remember was how at a young age, I knew I excelled in the arts. I drew a lot in preschool and when I was in Grade 7, I was able to recreate one of Frida Kahlo's still life paintings in a colored pencil sketch. In Grade 9, I was assigned a geography project, and you know for a fact I killed the presentation part (and if you said no, wow I see how it is). But every single time I'd get my graded marks back, it would solidify my relationship to the arts; that art and I would be besties for a long time. I knew that I was a creative and I was sure that I was. Then the quarantine came, and I am privileged to say that I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted. I could paint and draw, but that's where I really practiced my makeup artistry (something I'll get into talking about one day). I was 17 then and I had spent a lot of my days scrolling and scrolling on social media trying to find inspiration, but it was hard. Instead of feeling inspired to draw in my sketchbook, I began to feel insecure. I started to question my artistic abilities a lot after high school. Was I as good of an artist as I thought? Well younger self, you are a great artist because you created this whole blog so stop worrying. But when I was younger, I wouldn't have known that.
So, this is my advice to you 14,15,16,17,18, and 19 year old self.
As an artist who's painted some paintings by 20, I've learned this. You need to give your sketchbook some time. Your sketchbook doesn't need to be filled with masterpieces, it needs to be filled with your thoughts and ideas. Whether that may be through writing, jotting down notes, scribbling, or maybe you're like me and you've started a painting in your sketchbook and never got back to finishing it. It's all about how you look at the situation. I recently did a YouTube video about my 'sketchbook tour' and had an interesting thought. A lot of my pages looked unfinished, but it's not that they were unfinished per se, it was that in a specific moment in time an idea would hit me, and I needed to let it out. This is what I would naturally do when I felt this burst of creativity. I would give that burst of creativity a home in my sketchbook. Instead of looking at my sketchbook now and saying, "wow these are all unfinished, why can't it look better?", an optimistic shift in perspective would instead begin to see it as "you had an idea, you gave that idea an identity, and if you gave it more time, you'd have given it life." Even if it was unfinished or looked like blobs of paint, the idea was there. The creativity was there. The only issue is that I didn't give myself enough time to cultivate those ideas. I was looking for quick, fast, and something that would be a form of instant gratification, but that isn't how art works. Although, you know what works in that way? Social Media. Quick, fast, and instant. The videos themselves at least, but we all know that loads of time and effort was made before those art videos came into the algorithm. The paintings you see in the gallery, whether they're renaissance or contemporary, take time. Social media masks real time and doesn't share how much real time and effort a creator puts into the video you're watching, unless they explicitly mention that. It's interesting how much time we invest scrolling away looking for inspiration, when real inspiration is drawn from our living experiences. Your sketchbook reflects who you are, who you've grown to become, and what you will be. Your sketchbook is more than just a book filled with pretty pictures, or in my case finished paintings lol. It's an echo of who you are, a personal track record of the brilliance that exists in your creative mind, and one day, when you're 21 too or however old you are or will be, I hope you'll look at your sketchbook and celebrate, appreciate, and accept the story of you. Thank you so much for joining me on today's article! Today's article is extra extra special because I turned 21 today and I've learned so much at 20, and fun fact that is why this website is called O313 "OH THREE ONE THREE" Studio, because my birthday is on March 13th!! Also here's that sketchbook I was talking about :)