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...?
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…
