Other | Sketching - Aug 2016

Your SKETCHBOOK: 
Your Critical Visualization Tool

Figure 1: Drawing on my imagination, I create pictures of expressive faces in a multitude of scenarios.

I recently read this wall text at the National Gallery in London about two extraordinarily-accomplished 19th c. French painters: "Degas met Ingres in his youth and was told by him to 'draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory.'"

I agree. Drawing in a sketchbook provides an immediate, and satisfying, medium for recording the world, and for experimenting with new pictorial ideas. For me, I like to draw people in railroad stations, cafes and in parks; I like to imagine people I have never met and to animate their faces with lively or deadpan expressions; I also like to use my sketchbook to invent places that have never existed, but which might make good subjects for a more finished drawing or painting.

Figure 2. My sketch, featured on the cover of Drawing magazine, Summer 2016, with an article about my sketchbook drawing practice inside.

Yes, my sketchbook is analog, not digital. I like to draw on smooth paper with a gold-tipped fountain pen (Mont Blanc) that responds to the pressure of my fingers, and to smear the ink with a small wet brush to quickly establish volume and gradations. 

I have nothing against digital sketching but, at the moment, pressure-sensitive tablets with integral CPUs aren’t cheap enough, or small enough, for me to get started. I’m ready to jump when the marketplace changes.

Digital technology, of course, permits an artist to endlessly press “undo” to reverse an unwanted effect, and to continue working until a desired outcome is achieved.  Analog sketchbooks, on the other hand, can contain lots of loose ends, mistakes, and false starts.  But there’s also a value in failure, and having a private venue for experimentation and what-the-hell.  At times, I’ve been surprised to get ideas from what I had thought was a wreck of a sketch, noticing some unique visual detail that comes through that didn’t survive in more finished, careful work. 

I recommend that all artists, digital or analog, carry around a small sketchbook and pens/pencils in their pocket or purse. Many of my ideas for paintings, and a lot of what I’ve learned about facial expressions, have been the result of my time spent drawing from life, or from my imagination. I suggest that you number and date all of your sketchbooks, the archive of your "visual memories" which are now at the ready to recycle into your future artistic masterworks.

Credits: All sketchbook drawings by Gary Faigin.