Thus far, I’ve only ever managed to fill one sketchbook (that I can recall) cover to cover, and that was the sketchbook I kept from the fall of 2017 to the spring of 2020. Most of the sketches, especially the earlier ones, were ideas for a story that at the time, I was considering trying to make into a graphic novel. The above image is one of my favorite pages from the book. I love drawing collections of objects, especially when they give you some sense of a story or a character who owns them. In this case, the character is a fellow named Havard who lives in the woods and makes do with a mix of things foraged, scavenged, and hand-crafted. He is not a terribly well-adjusted individual, nor indeed entirely human, as you can guess from some of the other drawings I have of him from the same sketchbook. But I had (and still have) a soft spot for him, so I drew a lot of him.
My story idea from that time was set in the real world (the main location was a campground, which included the lamp post and the campsite number/trash bag pole below), but there were definite fantasy elements: monsters and magic and such. I eventually scrapped the setting because, although I like the visual juxtaposition of modernity against things more wild and ancient and mysterious, I found that by bringing magic into the real world, I wound up mixing my Christian theology with the pagan and the morbid more than I was comfortable with. But Havard has stayed around; he and other important characters and story elements are still developing in the back of my head, though now in a world less like our own.
Once I made the decision to change the setting for my story, I started using the sketchbook less for character concepts and more for just practicing my skills as an artist. One exercise I decided to try was to pick something I wanted to get better at drawing and draw it 100 times. Reindeer were a part of the new story setting, so I drew 100 reindeer. I did come away with more confidence in my understanding of reindeer shapes and positions, and I very quickly determined that if you’re drawing a lot of something, smaller is better.
The last portion of my sketchbook was mainly drawings from life, especially botanical studies, which was an enjoyable way to wrap up such a long-lived project.
