Safari Book

"An Artist is a sketchbook with a person attached."-Irwin Greenburg

This should of been posted a while ago. This is my Journal/personal/analytical sketchbook.

I believe the last entry was on December the 25th 2010.

I should of started keeping a journal as soon as I started college, but alas it wasn't on my mind at the time.  At first it started out as my analytical sketchbook, for this project, then it gradually turned into a journal/personal skecthbook. I try and write in it everyday as well as draw. I think it is very important to draw at least something, even if its just a doodle everyday. Just to keep in the right mind set and to keep your skill strong.

Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worth while, and it will do you a world of good." -Cennino Cennini

I put everything in my sketchbook, from newspaper clipping or pictures that I like, quotes, names of books or songs I should look up, dreams I've had, dates, notes to myself, memories..lots of memories, my feelings on what I am currently working on, etc.and of course drawings.

Usually I spend time in my sketchbook in the evenings, watching telly and trying to keep warm in the sitting room. Its my way of mellowing out.

I draw what I see around me, usually one of our many cats or our little dog. sometimes I'll draw from magazines or from old photo's, and occasionally I'll make collages.

I'm not trying to make anything pacific, its just practice, a way of getting ideas or thoughts down on paper, so you can put them away and deal with them later, or in some cases never I think of them again.

Sometimes my mind needs a good cleaning out and this is a good way to do it.

Its only recently that I have really started to enjoy keeping a sketchbook, I feel sorry for the person who has to look back through them in the future. I wonder what they will think of me!?

I was pleased with myself, I have a very bad habit of not completing sketchbooks, I nearly always leave a few pages blank at the end, this one is filled from back to front.

I started a new one right after I finished this one, I have to say there is nothing more liberating than a blank book, with pages waiting to be filled, but there is also nothing more frightening or intimidating.

"Sketchbooks in general... seem to contain mainly studies for paintings... For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them."

- Robert Mother well

"The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook." -Robert Henri