The Big ‘Uns

Carrying on with my online exposition of my sketchbooks over the years, and going from the smallest to the BIGGEST…

I’ve had a love-meh relationship with LARGE sketchbooks over the years (“hate” is definitely a bit strong…). I do like the space to draw a full-sized figure… and then draw it again… and then another time… all on the same page… Or dozens of the same head over and over to try and get it right or tweak things… On the other hand they’re a bit unwieldy to haul about most times. And not terribly discreet. And hard to scan things from – I haven’t even bothered trying here, I just took pictures…

Also I like having ONE book that I draw in, rather than jumping back and forth between different sketchbooks (of different sizes) depending on where and when I was drawing. I like the idea of my sketchbooks forming some sort of linear narrative. “This was the one I used in early 2011”… “This one I used throughout 1996”… rather than “well there’s some from that time in here… and then more over in this one…. And other stuff in this one over here…” If that makes any sense…

The earliest of the large sketchbooks I have is a hardcover 10.5x14” of unknown manufacture. I tend to put stickers on, or otherwise decorate, sketchbooks – mostly so I know, just looking at it which way is up and thus which side is the front (otherwise I would always pick it up and open it upside down and backwards). Often the stickers were just free stickers I picked up here and there… so it should be noted that while I am tangentially aware that “Thirty Ought Six” is a band (as well as a rifle caliber) I am completely unfamiliar with their music!?

I can date thisvery first picture in this sketchbook as 1994 – the year I met Amanda. I drew this picture of her talking to her mum on the phone in our crappy apartment above Lydia’s Pub on Broadway.

Also on this page, as on so many pages of ALL the sketchbooks I’ve owned over the years, are some scribbled notes. Looks like addresses of ‘zines I was probably trading with at the time…

On other pages there are phone numbers (sometimes without names written beside them), other address, lists of things to do, supplies or groceries to get, or just ideas for paintings or comics or projects written out to remind me at some point later,  etc, etc…

I did a lot of planning of comics in this book. I’m not sure if this one ever got made into a comic… maybe in one of the earliest oBliViosiTers…?

More comics planning

This almost looks like the “good copy” of the “How Tim Met Amanda” comic….?

More of “How Tim Met Amanda”

Planning layouts of the “True Army Tales” comics. It’s interesting to sometimes look back and the various ways I developed comics – sometimes just sketched out squares with words in them… sometimes a tickfigures to remind myself of where people were going to be in a panel…

More planning of comics.. page breakdowns with a minimum of actual drawing…

I’ve drawn in less than a third of this book… that last picture you can see seeping though the last page I drew on was relatively recently (5-6 years ago)

The next oldest is an even BIGGER 14x17” Strathmore 400 series Premium Recycled Sketch.

I like this one… if it weren’t for that linear narrative hang up (and lack of a dedicated “drawing place”) I’d like have  a place where this (or othrs like it if it were ever filled up) could be left to work in at home on… well… just the sorts of things I like doing in these bigger books.

This one has also seen little usage partly due to the disintegrating soft cover on it. I ONLY buy hard cover sketchbooks now… 

And this is the sort of thing I like doing in BIG sketchbooks – working out how to draw people/characters/things, etc. These are from the mid-1990s when I was still working on the “True Army Tales”.

Not sure what I cut out of that page there...!? 

Figuring out classmates for the “School Fight Comix” in ObliViosiTer #28

Trying to figure out how to draw Rob McLennan, a poet I met at the Small Press Expo in Ottawa in… 1998…? I did some "good copies"on separate pages. I think he used one or two in some 'zine or book or something...? 

Karl and Pat from 8^th Street Books and Comics for a series of comic strip/ads I did for them that ran in The Sheaf and Soundscape (the old program guide for CFCR 90.5FM – Saskatoon’s community radio station from 1998 – 2000…

Another classmate that was to be in the next issue of “School Fight Comix” which I never got around to doing..

Characters for a new series of JJ BMX Courier comics I did for my (old) friend (who I haven't spoken to in years...) Shane Neville’s Backlash BMX website. When would that have been...? Hmmmm....

Why finish up one sketchbook when I can buy a new one… I decided at some point that I did like working in BIG sketchbooks and wanted to start doing so again… but the first one above (hardcover, NOT coil bound) was… well… not coil bound thus making it even more unwieldy and inconvenient to draw in than a coil bound sketchbook, and the Strathmore (above) was starting to lose it’s cover… so…

It should be noted, in this case, I am VERY familiar with Propaghandi and listened to them a lot around the time I started using this sketchbook!

This sketchbook was made by Colours Art and Drawing Supplies (it says so on the bottom of the back cover). This one is actually getting close to being full up! 

The Jam. I have no idea when I drew this… 10 years ago…? ore more...? Maybe…? I think I was working at the Vinyl Diner at the time.

All sorts of things in this book…

Sketches of ideas for woodworking projects I never even started (beyond sketching and figuring out how much wood I would theoretically need…). This would have been from over ten years ago... 

This book I’ve come back to and filled in spaces with doodles and sketches here and there. The picture of JJ here was probably drawn over a decade ago. But the pig is a rough sketch for Piggy Rides with her Violin - a painting I less than two years ago… and the colour drawing of myself I was briefly using as my profile picture on facebook... 

Figuring out how to draw Amanda.

More of Amanda…

Amanda and the kids.

These last page is relatively recent (within the last couple years), but the next couple were drawn probably six or seven years ago - I briefly thought about about returning to comics to do a comic (book?) about the summer we did a bike tour of the Icefields Parkway (From Jasper to Banff) while Amanda was four month pregnant with Finnegan. It was to be an epic touching on anxiety surrounding the immanent arrival of a first child, returning to something we’d always wanted to do bu fell by the wayside (bike touring, drawing comics), plus a travelogue of our adventures…

I still think about rekindling the project… Here’s a couple pages I did right in the sketchbook. I didn’t draw Amanda’s head because I was torn about how to draw here – in fact, now that I think about it, part of those two pages of figuring out how to draw Amanda, above, may have been from this era – I was thinking about changing how I drew her, but obviously was keeping the old way of drawing myself…

Anyway…

(this was a bit of an “in joke” that I threw in because it was funny I wasn’t really THAT obsessed with her boobs… really… I wasn’t…)

and the next panel after this was to be Amanda saying “well I guess we just got LUCKY” and me muttering “I’d hardly call it ‘getting lucky’…”

(For those that haven’t deduced what the heck this is all about; we’d kind of planned on having kids… but Amanda wanted to be sure to wait until she’d been in her new job long enough that by the time the kid popped out she’d qualify for maternity leave… and when we actually started trying to make babies it took about a week for her to get knocked up…)

More recent ideas for paintings.

Why use an old one when you can buy a new one…

In my defence, I’ll point out that, until quite recently, I’d madeno attempt to keep sketchbooks in one place and my many sketchbooks were spread out in various boxes, on shelves, uinder piles… and I had probably forgotten I had the one before or thought it lost or thrown away…

Or I may have just happened to be standing in a store that had art supplies and saw this book and thought “I should get drawing again…” and just bought it as incentive to get myself drawing again. I’m not sure… It was a few years ago. There’s very few drawings in this one. More recent drawings appear in the one above – clearly I’d decided to go back and fill that one up first before drawing any more in this one…

It’s made by Canson.

This must have been drawn about four or five years ago. That’s Finnegan and Keira  sitting and drawing at tables that were in our living room. It was the beginning of our drawing together.

A couple drawings from 2010 – the elephant and space suits would have been drawn in the spring of that year – they were sketches for a t-shirt design for Saskatoon Suzuki Strings “Summer String Experience”… the sketch for the Family Portrait would have been drawn in the fall… I do like to fill up the page (if not the whole book) – unlike my kids who draw a single small picture in the center of the page and then move on and never look back…!)

Finally some drawings of the bikes I have owned. Sort of a visual list I made…

I need to get that drawing table set up again and doodle in these some more… 

The Early Sketchbooks

To start this look at the sketchbooks I have owned through the ages, here are two of the earliest ones I still have... 

The earliest sketchbooks I have are from high school. One is actually dated 1987 (which, in the fall, when I’m pretty sure I was drawing in it, would have been the beginning of grade 10). The last drawings in the other would have been the summer before grade ten… because there are a number of drawings from a Scout Jamboree I attended that summer. 

This Earlier of the two is a coil-bound, soft cover, 5.5x8.5” Grumbacher “All-Technique” medium weight white drawing paper sketchbook (“for ink, charcoal, pastel, pencil”). It has a lot of drawings done with charcoal (probably because, at the time, I thought it more “artistic” than pencil…). There are also a few with chalk pastel colour.

The last drawings in the book are from the summer of 1987 during the North Saskatchewan Region Scout Jamboree. Although there are some drawings that make me think I had this much, much earlier and there was a break between the earlier drawings in the book and the later ones.

These first couple were pictures likely copied from game books – Dungeons and Dragons Oriental Adventures, perhaps? Ninja I was all about Ninjas and Sanurai in the mid-eighties…

I think this might actually be a drawing of my mom…?

Here’s why I’m thinking this book may have been started in 1986 (or earlier!?) This would have been from a Grade 8 class trip to Blackstrap – a local ski hill.

I would have also been playing Dungeons and Dragons Oriental Adventures with my friend David around 1985-1986…

The rest I’m pretty sure are from the Jamboree in 1987

My old green tent… Though I’m not sure whose legs those would be. I’m pretty sure I was tenting alone that year… Maybe they’re my own imagined legs… Or maybe I was sharing a tent with some one and just forgot…

Or maybe that was Schwanke’s tent…? Maybe he had a green one too…?

Sunset over Anglin lake. I probably didn’t finish it because I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes…

An extremely rare full-colour drawing. Of all the sketchbooks, over all the years, I think this may be the only full-colour drawing I’ve ever done in a sketchbook!

Another exceedingly rare early cartoony self-portrait (with not-so-rare idiotic poor spelling!?)… the beginning, perhaps, of my auto-bio comics.

It rained a lot that week at the jamboree. I was standing on a stage (pictured in another drawing below) along with Calvin and Shannon. Water had pooled in the tarp over the stage and Shannon decided to use a stick to push up the tarp and drain the water. Unfortunately, instead of it going over the side closest, where she anticipated it would, it quickly ran down to the side edge and poured all over me…

Entrance to the campground

Said stage… I’m pretty sure the figure in the middle wearing a sweater is Shannon.

A Tipi – I think Shannon was sleeping in it…

The Smaller one (4”x6” hardcover “Signature Edition Classic Sketch Book”) is filled mostly with sketches of my classmates I did during classes. I tended to sit to the right rear of classrooms – where no one would see me looking at them and drawing pictures of them. Consequently there are a LOT of drawing of the back of peoples heads?! Some of them I’d written down, on the back of the page, who they were – but most I don’t need to look, I actually remember who they were, for some reason (are the drawings that good!?). Others I didn’t write down, mostly because they were so awful I didn’t ever want anyone to discover the book and look at one of the poorly drawn pictures with someone’s name attached to it and think “That’s supposed to be [insert name of victim here]?!” Even now I am feeling reluctant to put names to any of these. What am I worried about, though – like anyone I knew from high school that might know any of these people would ever be looking at this blog!?

They were all drawn very quickly – almost gesture like drawings – probably because I was horrified someone might notice me drawing pictures of them.. or the teacher might notice me drawing pictures of my classmates when I should really have been doing something else… A lot seem to be of people reading . I think these might have been during a reading period at the beginning of some English (or “Language Arts” classes). 


While the pages are small, the drawing and tinier still - taking up only a small section in teh center of the page (much like how my own kids draw now... maybe I shouldn't hassle them so much to try and use more of the page... They'll get there...). Unlike the previous book, which was almost all done with charcoal pencil, these were almost all done with lead (well... graphite) pencils...

Joel

Jodi

Claire

Warren, one of the few that was actually a friend.

David

A rare picture of one of my teachers. Of the dozens of drawings in teh little book only two were of teachers. This, I think, was Mr. Parsons, my grade 10 geometry teacher. I actually liked geometry.

My beloved Converse All-Stars. They were red.

Kieran. Not a classmate – apparently I took this book along to Youth Parliament.

Warren again.

Erin

Erin again.

I know I had another sketchbook around the same time – 1985-ish… it was a bigger one – probably 9”x12”. I think, for some reason, I gave (or threw) it away… Either way it's long, long gone. 

The thing I really like about sketchbooks is they’re a bit easier to hold onto. So much work has gone into them, it’s hard to say “bah, I don’t need to hold on to this picture” and just throw it out – like I’ve done with so, so many individual drawing and paintings. Some of the earliest records of my artistic endeavors are contained within these sketch books - not my earliest drawings - just the earliest that remain. 

Easier to store too – they can be stood up on a shelf like any other book…

It’s probably why I encourage my own kids to draw stuff in sketchbooks rather than on loose individual pages.