More Sketchbook

Take a look at pages from Laura's sketchbook

Hello everyone,

Hope you’re having a good week. I’m back today with a look at a couple of pages out of my small sketchbook. Again these are work in progress – I’ve actually done more to them since I took the photos so I’ll have to update you again very soon!

I told you last time that I always have more than one book on the go. This is to avoid sitting around watching paint dry – while one book is wet, you simply work in another and so on. But if I can share one other tip with you, it would be to work in books of different sizes. I have a mid-sized book, a larger one (A4), and several small books. These are all square and are about 5 inches square. I do enjoy the square format. I just looked to share the link with you for the exact book, but at the moment they don’t seem to be available via Amazon. They do have the rectangle version though which I have also used, same cover and paper, just different proportion, here’s a link.

The reason I recommend working in different size books is that sometimes a subject will suit a larger page, sometimes it needs something smaller. The advantage of the small books is that they can go in your pocket or bag and it’s convenient to have them to hand and more likely then that I’ll work in them!

I realise that at first glance these pages might appear a bit gloomy in theme because of the skulls. I am thinking a little bit about mortality and the whole life and death thing, but really the skull is quite an anonymous face and I like that. It’s just a symbol of a person. I can use it when I want to represent a person, but not do a portrait, it’s working like a shorthand for me. A symbol.

I hope that there’s also a bit of humour there. The skull in the page above was photographed at the Science Museum if I remember rightly. It’s the decorative top of a walking cane and I thought it was quite fun with its moving eyes and tongue!

I am continuing to also use an eye motif in my work. On this page you can see a photo of a display of glass eyes. I really like that at first it might just look like a polka dot design and only on closer inspection you see that it’s eyes!

I’m grouping together eye motifs that I’ve cut from packaging tissue and photos of eyes from magazines. I’d like a lot more of these but I don’t tend to have magazines that have that many faces in them. I’ll just add more to this page as I come across them.

so at this stage there’s lots of collage of photos and found bits that I’ve been collecting. I am planning on adding more drawing and probably some painted layers too.

Thanks for visiting today.

Laura x