Art Fun Cheap

Every artist, even—maybe especially—a part-time, just-for-fun artist should have a sketchbook. If you can’t act on your art ideas when you think of them, you can jot down a few notes, a diagram, a primitive sketch, and keep those ideas for use later.

We all have so many ideas. They pop into our heads at odd moments sometimes, when we don’t have time to use them. Later, when we’re ready to work with them, often they’re gone. The answer is to keep a sketchbook.

In fact, many of us keep several sketchbooks. You need at least one that you can carry with you everywhere, and you may need a larger one, which you may keep at home to make larger sketches or complete drawings. You might want extras in travel bags, totes, or the car—so you’re never without one.

The sketchbook you carry with you can be small enough to fit in a pocket or purse—about 3 x 5 inches or 4 x 6 inches. Or it can be more of a normal book size of 6 x 9 inches, which you can easily carry in a tote bag, backpack or briefcase.

You can use your sketchbook for all kinds of things. Since you always have it with you, you can take notes at lectures. You can make a to-do list. You can jot down addresses and phone numbers. (I reserve a section in the back to make contact info easy to find.)

Your sketchbook becomes the book that you live in. Even if you also keep an appointment book or dayplanner for work, you’ll find a sketchbook handy for making full notes on important meetings or projects sometimes. Some information is too important to lose.

Even in the business world, an unobtrusive hardbound sketchbook can be carried to meetings. No one will notice, and you can use the downtime when a meeting starts late, and there’s nothing else you can do, to make notes for future projects.

The real power of the sketchbook comes into play when you do have leisure time for art. You’ll never have an artist’s block again. All you have to do is flip through your sketchbook to find dozens of ideas to choose from.

It’s very interesting, too, to look back through your sketchbook and see how many of those ideas you had completely forgotten about. Without the sketchbook, they would have been lost forever. On the other hand, some ideas keep coming back in slightly different forms. Each time, you forget that you had thought of that idea before, so you record it in your book. And it’s there when you need it.

It’s a great idea to save all your sketchbooks. Really use them, and you will eventually have quite a few on your bookshelf. Save those ideas for a rainy day.

Also, a sketchbook is a sort of journal. When you go back through your old sketchbooks, with lecture notes, sketches, names and addresses, concert tickets stuck between the pages, and so on, you can vividly recall events you would otherwise have forgotten.

Many people say that even a single primitive sketch can vividly evoke the time and place where it was made—much more so than a photograph. The sketches below were quickly and crudely drawn, but they vividly captured two occasions for me, The first two images were sketched at a party for a friend who has since passed away.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of going through your travel photos and trying to remember where you were—and what on earth you were thinking—when you took some of them. That never happens with sketchbooks.

When you look at a sketch you made, for a moment you are back there in that scene where you made the sketch. The details come flooding back into your mind. And that is a big part of the power of the sketchbook.

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