Sketchbook

Here's a few sketchbook pages from when I was away travelling.

Getting into the habit of observational drawing is a real struggle at the moment. Drawing from life, out and about, is probably the most beneficial and rewarding way of illustrating (for me at least) so why is it so hard to actually spend time doing so? Maybe it's laziness, in that the feeling of any time away from actual 'work' i.e. commissioned work, should be spent doing no work at all. Falling into a habit of spending the time in-between-work/waiting-on-feedback doing very little constructive is all to easy to do so. Having the self-discipline to set ad-hoc drawing projects is something that I certainly need to be more committed to. This is in itself sort of contradictory; as working as an illustrator, often solitarily, having to be incredibly self-motivated and disciplined over many years of toiling, slowly building up a regular client base should set oneself up fairly well in order to maintain such motivations in order to work on your own projects. Maybe there is a complacency when you reach a comfort level with regular commissioned work that the discipline and motivation ceases in pursuing personal work? Maybe it's just that sometimes after working a couple of weeks straight on various commissions that it's nice to simply do nothing when you have a couple of days off. Either way I definitely need to make a more conscious effort to just draw for the sake of it. My intentions with the travelling reference material that I have is still to create some sort of journal or a loose narrative series of illustrations. This project by Steven Wilkin is great in it's simplicity and directness, really inspiring for anyone interested in reportage illustration and something that I found really interesting as a way of creating a very inclusive exhibition of typically precious and personal sketchbook work.