Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
🎁 How about a special birthday present?
It's my birthday — so here's a present for you! |
Hi Reader: Wait, an essay on Tuesday?! Yes, it's my birthday, so here's a present for you! Because you're a subscriber to my Friday Essays, you're getting an extra perk: a free sample of my Tuesday Newsletter Studio Notebook. Over the last few months, I have been sharing each of the sketchbooks I have filled over the last 25 years, and we are up to Volume 17. I also write individual essays about the artists who mentored my sketchbook practice, sharing their work, and explaining what I learned from them. And each month, I write an in-depth essay on individual tools that I used as I developed my sketchbook practice and explain what they've contributed to my art over the years. Enjoy it, and if you'd like to get this sort of stuff every week (and access to the library of past issues), sign up now. It's just $7 per month and would make a lovely birthday present — for me.
Let's dive into Volume 17, from the summer of 2000.I continue to work in a little pocket Moleskine sketchbook , one of about a dozen I kept in succession. Small enough to fit in my back pocket, and filled with paper that has a heavy sizing on it that resists watercolor to some extent. During this period. I worked mainly in Tombow markers, colored pencils, and Sakura fineliners. I'd been invited to visit my friend and fellow illustrated journal keeper, D.Price, in his home in Eastern Oregon, and the first section of this sketchbook chronicles that trip. Here I am in Newark Airport, killing time and peering over Lake Erie. I love drawing maps of my journeys, and here you can see the first leg of my trip to Chicago. I had to spend some time at the Chicago airport, and I pulled a piece of brown hand towel from the men's room, and drew one of the amazing dinosaur skeletons they have in the airport, and I continued to map the journey. I also brought along my tiny Polaroid camera and took a little picture of Iowa out the plane window. Dan picked me up at the airport in Idaho, but his car ran out of gas midway, so I did this drawing of the empty road while he hitched a ride to get some gas. I'm a city boy, and being stuck in the middle of nowhere was a little bit scary for my overly fertile imagination. On many of my journal pages, I make individual drawings and then tie them together with a composition, in this case, some annotation and a map. The big annual rodeo in Dan's town was a new and fascinating experience for me, meeting and drawing honest-to-gosh cowboys. We drew a lot of farm equipment on that trip, full of details and interesting new subject matter. A runaway horse dashed by, and Dan grabbed it. It had cut its legs on a barbed wire fence, and there was blood on the road. That smudge in the upper right-hand corner is 25-year-old horse blood. Another piece of farm equipment, this time with a pair of old boots on the gearshift levers. Country ingenuity — a defunct tractor turned into a mailbox. I really like this composition, using the rule of thirds to divide a spread into two different drawings and a chunk of text. Dan lives in a little house that he built, called a kiva. It's made out of rock and embedded in the side of a hill — about seven feet in circumference and one of the most restful places I've ever slept. Inside it's very meticulous and neatly organized, like a little ship cabin. Skipping ahead to my trip back home, a big, fat plane, and more time to kill in Chicago. I've shared about a quarter of the sketchbook pages I filled in that one week. It was a great trip, full of inspiration and new experiences. My buddy sent me a bunch of photos of me from the trip and I pasted them into the book. Typical days: drawing in a graveyard, sitting next to a covered wagon. My experience in Oregon continued to resonate when I came back to New York. I just wanted to draw nature. Here are some plants that were growing on our terrace garden. Sketching buildings in New York, and the tan lines that I'd gotten from wearing sandals all summer. My feet were filthy when I came back from my trip, and those marks remained a souvenir. I continue to crave drawing natural things, resorting here to our groceries, and remembering my weeks in the wilds of eastern Oregon, hanging out with another artist who loved to draw and keep a sketchbook as much as I did. If you enjoyed this sketchbook tour, just wait till you see what's ahead!I've got another hundred sketchbooks to share, plus dozens of inspiring artist mentors and a studio full of cool materials to delve into. I hope you'll join me!
Your pal, Danny
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Danny Gregory: I help you make art again
Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
When I was 27, I almost learned to play the piano. I’d gone to a dinner party, and the host—a film editor, not a musician—sat down at an old upright and played something slow and emotional. It wasn’t flashy. He used both hands, sure, but he wasn’t showing off. It sounded like he was speaking with the keys. I remember thinking: I want to do that. The next morning, I looked up local music teachers in the Yellow Pages. Then I paused. It would take years to get good. I imagined scales, clunky...
For the last quarter century of his life, my grandfather spent hours each day at his word processor, writing recollections, essays, and articles. He had been a doctor, but like many aging artists and writers, he turned to the page to make sense of the life he had lived. Every decade, he wrote a new version of his autobiography—hundreds of pages of translucent, onion-skinned remembrance. Some he mailed to me or my mother, but most sat in desk drawers or binders, unread, unappreciated. When he...
Each morning, I would stagger out of bed and sit at my kitchen table with a journal and a pen. For the next fifteen minutes, I would fill three pages with whatever oozed out of my bleary brain — anxieties, questions, nightmares, prognostications. It was part of my quest for clarity and perspective, a journey that had led me through religion, philosophy, self-help, and finally to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Her book prescribed a weekly artist’s date and morning pages, and I had dutifully...