How to Start a Sketchbook

I adore looking at other people’s sketchbooks. Da Vinci produced sketchbooks that are timeless, owned by the Queen now, and are always on display in museums and being studied.

You can see and watch endless reels of the most beautiful sketchbooks on Instagram. The drawings and paintings in them are so good people would almost certainly buy and frame them.

So naturally… I wanted one too! I wanted to make such a beautiful sketchbook.

Starting a sketchbook

I started a sketchbook and realised that my sketches were… well… quite bad.

I went back to the drawing board. I thought - I can draw. I know I can, but why aren’t my sketchbooks as good as my final pieces? I didn’t want to show anyone the drawings I’d done as I was ashamed of them.

The sketchbook I had started was slowly used less and less.

Maybe I had the wrong type of sketchbook, the wrong type of paper or the wrong size, and that’s why it wasn’t working. Maybe I shouldn’t have a sketchbook at all and just take loose pages. Maybe I should ditch the pencil and use watercolour… I went round and round my head trying to find a solution.

I tried using a couple of different materials and… to my absolute annoyance my drawings got a lot worse. I became increasingly frustrated and I eventually stopped using the sketchbook entirely.

The Secret Trick

Lucky me, I had a one-off plein air painting lesson with the artist Hester Berry - she told us she had also experienced the anxiety of needing to have a perfect sketchbook, and that it had led her to be hesitant in her drawing. I couldn’t believe it – professional artists I admire also had this problem.

She gave some interesting advice for overcoming it - write your shopping lists in your sketchbook.

I was skeptical at first – how is it going to be a perfect sketchbook with a shopping list in it..? Was she secretly hiding the shopping lists at the back? Nope… she said the shopping lists were alongside the drawings or on fresh pages. And just to put it into context – she had a stunning sketchbook, I saw it and it was full of beautiful drawings.

The reason for the shopping lists was to take away the feeling that you can mess up your sketchbook and make it anything other than perfect. Mess it up already.

Start with an imperfect sketchbook. Keep it imperfect. Then you can never have the fear of making it perfect.

After that something magical happens – you actually start to produce good drawings.

Photo by Doriana Dream on Unsplash

The desire for perfection

After a little while, my partner bought me a sketchbook for my birthday. I thought this time I should try implementing the advice. I was determined - I will use it and not let it sit on the bookshelf empty.

I didn’t write my shopping lists in it – I don’t use shopping lists – instead I wrote notes. I read a lot, so I used it to summarise parts of books, to jot down something that was on my mind that I didn’t want to forget, or sometimes it was as simple as ‘meet Grace for a coffee at 3’, or ‘take the bins out’.

It took away the need for perfection. I started drawing.

Now my sketchbooks are full to the brim and used on a regular basis. I confess though, I don’t have the most beautiful sketchbooks. I gave up on this idea in order to have a sketchbook at all. Instead, my sketchbook is full of my ideas and my memories. It’s a sketchbook journal of all the places I’ve been and people I’ve met.

I write less notes in my sketchbook nowadays, but if I ever feel the fear coming back, if I ever catch myself thinking, ‘I don’t want to ruin a page’, then I’ll quickly jot down some meaningless notes in it. If you really can’t think of anything to write, I have on occasion just scribbled all over a page.

It was fear that stopped me. I couldn’t produce a good sketchbook because of the pressure I was putting on myself.

In summary, the best advice I ever got for keeping a sketchbook - Ruin a page intentionally to get rid of the fear that you might ruin a page.

Make an intentional massive mistake and then whatever you do after will be more than good enough.

If you’re starting a sketchbook, whatever you do is right. If you’re caught up on ‘how to’, then mess up that sketchbook a bit.

How do you keep your sketchbook habit up? Let me know in the comments.

If you liked this post, you might also like - ‘The Benefits of Making Mistakes’