The sketchbook project will depart for Brooklyn soon!

I finished my sketchbook for the Sketchbook project today. You can see the whole thing here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FO_Bky9lU5IWPByQaennYgIW6pDsTjIb/view?usp=sharing Eventually it will be scanned and posted to the sketchbook project archive and if it arrives in time, it will travel too. https://www.sketchbookproject.com

It's always brilliant to work on something with lots of smaller parts over a sustained period of time and when it's compete it feels much greater than the parts.  This sketchbook is full of quick direct drawing about the objects I collect and arrangements that allow me to make colour studies.

I made the final two drawings this morning and then bound the pages, cleaned them up and will post it on Monday. Here are a few of the drawings that have kernals of ideas which I have either already responded to again or hope to later. 

Risk Taking and Quick Sketches

Some people freeze at a blank page.  That doesn't happen to me but I do work more intuitively and feel liberated to move things around, change colour and make compositions in a different way when I work (quickly) in a sketchbook.  At 58, even knowing that I sending a book somewhere to potentially have an audience doesn't make me too tight.  I look forward to the time each day when I will draw without intending to do anything beyond draw. Obviously I am scanning the drawings - there will be 32 in the end that I'll send in the sketchbook to the Sketchbok project https://www.sketchbookproject.com. I'm not sure if I will ever use the drawings I'm making for anything else but I believe that just recording all these arrangements is making it easier for me to use those intuitive muscles in the future!

The freedom of gifting your drawings

Deciding to make a sketchbook with a theme, in my opinion, creates a momentum of its own. Another thing I've found is that knowing that I am 'releasing' the drawings makes me freer and sometimes better. I discovered The Sketchbook Project https://www.sketchbookproject.com/ before Christmas and began putting my sketchbook together, due early March, over the weekend.  They say you can rebind your sketchbook with different paper so I began doing that.  After a hiccup I decided I needed four signatures for the pages to sit right and prepared them for pastel with gouache and ground. There are 32 pages so I need to make at least one drawing a day.

If you don't know about the Sketchbook project, you pay, they send you a sketchbook, you draw like mad and send your sketchbook back to them, in Brooklyn, and you never see it again unless you visit the Sketchbook project, or find it digitally online. Good thing I have no problems with letting go.