Jamie's Sketchbook

Lesson two of Liz Steel’s Sketchbook Design course is Contained Compositions. Draw your frames first and design the page before you sketch, then find things to put in the boxes. That’s my favorite way to do it. Then one can get more varied (vertical, horizontal, round, asymmetrical), and eventually try dropping the borders altogether. The one rule is no overlapping.

I loved it. I even wrote “Grids make me happy!” on one of my journal cards! Having a plan makes it all so much easier. No analysis paralysis!

A planning page to start with. I started these planning pages for this course, and they have made my life so much better! I will never stop making these! It has the October calendar, the lesson checklist, and a tiny tracker grid for each spread (daily spread, scan, post, comment, blog). Looking at it now, the planning page is itself a contained composition. On the right are six thumbnails where I was thinking on the page. I sketched many options in pencil before deciding on the final layout.

This one is a tidy grid of apple orchard cards. (The Junk journal ephemera is from Vectoria Designs “Apple Orchard” kit.) I cover the last days of September: weather, flood warnings, and finally getting some sleep. Opposite is a hand-lettered Dungeon Crawler Carl cover and a quick review. It’s utterly hilarious, a bit gory, and Jeff Hays’s narration is phenomenal. I’m so glad to have a good book again. Normally I’d layer this kind of ephemera all over itself, but for this assignment, I kept it strictly gridded. Every piece got its own space.

Next came varied shapes: a tall fold-out panel, two cards side by side, a circle for the Vegvísir, and two little cards tucked in the corner. The Inktober and Architober prompt lists ended up working as borders along the top and bottom. I’m doing a modified Inktober this year, and my real challenge is just getting back to ink sketching at all. Day one was an apple. The Architober list is a huge stretch for my skills, but I wanted it anyway. Not my favorite spread in this set, and I could not figure out what to draw in the big collaged note page, but I am moving on. It documents my not knowing, which is also part of the month I had.

This one has fewer frames. No painted background, just cards floating on white paper, with “October” lettered on the open page among a witch’s hat, a cauldron, a candle and a pumpkin. It wasn’t a great week. Some of it went into the journaling in code, and some of it went into ordering potion bottles. Retail therapy! I was really happy to practice calligraphy. Determined to begin to sketch again, I drew the small icon-like images. I have missed sketching!

Then no borders at all. This is my favorite of these contained pages, and I think I leveled up in how I think about them. The Secret of Site Q arrived, and I spent three hours trying to decipher the symbols. I haven’t cracked them yet. Nothing on this spread is framed, but nothing overlaps either. The grid is implied. I had so much fun adding the two collage elements, and I hand-drew the coded slip of paper, which turned out so great!

What I did differently: I designed the page first and filled it second. I left gutters, I gave everything room, and I resisted the urge to tuck one thing under another. Well-filled, grid-based pages will always be my go-to. However, I’m starting to see how a little more white space leaves some breathing room and lets certain items shine. The Site Q page feels like a bit of a breakthrough for me, and I’m eager to keep going!

Last year I was filling a 3.5×5.5 inch landscape sketchbook with food photos. The very receptive nature of the subject, meant I got bored quickly and reached for page design to keep it interesting. I began to collect ideas on the pages in the back of that book, as I used them. The small size of the paper, and the long landscape shape offered challenges to design, so I am very happy to have this reference!

For this exercise in class this year, I did a bunch of layouts for the square format sketchbook.

Continuing my elements that can be part of page design.

I think the heading here just made this page come together for me. I was very focused on page layout and design. I chose the size to fill the space just so, and I hunted among my stencils for that lettering/font choice. I colored it with that color to match the collage (especially that fun plaid!) and make the page harmonious. something about this particular page is a soothing little rest for the eye among the more complicated pages before and after it, in the sketchbook.

For this exercise I just had to try a John Ogilby style strip map for a very ordinary city trip. I love maps so much, but they are a challenge!

I decided to add the brushes behind this sketch/color chart to make it a more accurate capture of the actual delivery. And to fit in a secondary sketch, because I am not very good at thinking of secondary sketches! I rather love how this page turned out!

Though it’s nothing like how collage is used in the lesson, this is how I’ve been using collage a lot these days. Using junk journal ephemera and note cards to add some seasonal flavor and notecards when I’m not sketching other things. It keeps my sketchbook alive, even if I’m blocked in the sketching department.

I made this planning page for Lesson One to help me track everything, and I found I absolutely fell in love with having my planning and design thoughts happening in the thumbnails on the same page as the checklists! This kind of page is now a new must have for me. Thinking on the page, and having such thinking out loud, thinking on the page itself. I really thought about how to place all the various bits of information as well, and I loved adding the drawn lines to really pull it all together!. This might be my favorite page, so far, and it certainly is the one where I learned the most about myself!

I’m working my way through the elements for the first lesson of Sketchbook Design. I started by finishing the previously unfinished pages and adding elements to make said pages look better. Lesson one has seven different elements one can use, and here are three of them.

Adding the border around this color swatching chart really helped this page come together in a way I like a lot now. This page was one of those that sat for a long time in the “I don’t like it but what do I do with it?” arena. It is amazing how much the border helped. So did adding the stenciled column, but in many ways that feels like it reinforces that border even more. That’s where the eyes goes, right to those colors and it’s little border. This page also has that strong text block, which I like for the journaling, but it’s the border I felt did the best work for this page.

For this one I had those weather cards just hanging out there, and the collage ephemera just floating. I wondered how to create a cohesive page. I tried this strong color block, and suddenly this page really came together and looks like one page, rather than random elements. A few pages early I have a solid color background with weather cards on it, but the color block somehow makes it look even more intentional than the solid background. The horizontal aspect gives it shape and movement. I also notice the choice of color strongly impacts the feeling and the color story, perhaps coordinating with other pages in the sketchbook as a whole.

I held the white at the bottom and the right side of the color chart to really help the colors here shine. This page is to document this purchase, and keeping the design asymmetrical with that nice white edge makes this one feel almost soothing to me.

This page has been a breakthrough for me because I combined Page Design with making Design Notes and Thumbnails to actually think on the page, plan my coursework, and I even included a little chart to help me keep track of all the tasks! This page kept me inspired, because I was working out my layouts visually, and kept me from getting lost in where I was with the assignments! Planning plus design thumbnails, all on a designed page! Yes, I will be doing this again!

I have begun the page for the First Lesson as well. I haven’t decided if I’ll put class notes on the elements on this page, or the design ideas for some of the pages, yet. That will develop as I go, since this is a working, thinking-on-the-page page.

The assignment is to have a collection of unfinished pages so we can add elements to them to finish them off in the future. We are encouraged to go back and use older sketch pages, but I have a tendency to prefer very full pages without a lot of white space. Plus, once I’m done and moved on I don’t generally like to go back. Let the page sit as it was, that better captures what the moment was. However, knowing this assignment was coming up I did make sure to leave white spaces, or not otherwise finish off some pages for this exercise.

Additionally, I’m not actually sketching things or objects that much right now, which makes it even harder to select good examples for class. The class seems to assume you have a sketch first, and need to finish the page. Lately I’m more, I have my weather cards, and some notes, but no sketch, how can I finish this page. Slightly different angle. I tend to add color blocks a lot. I love to fill in with abstracts, and color charts. The color charts are usually documenting whatever new art supply I have either ordered, or found again in the dusty bins.

I collected a number of unfinished pages, wondering what I can do with them. And I definitely am adding more text this year, aiming for more documentation, and memories.

One of these I finished and it became my “Current Sketch”

The rest are still waiting.

I will confess it brings me a surprising amount of stress to have these unfinished pages waiting for so long! I am a completist at heart, and I’ve been itching to get them done, and move on to the fun new things I want to do!