i'm thoroughly surprised at myself and how my art has been going. a week or two ago i got a new sketchbook, mostly because an artist i follow on youtube uses almost exclusively those, when she doesn't make one herself. i've never seen them out in the wild, but the art store with the Good Paper Selection had one last one when i went to replace some used up pencil colors. and something about it really unlocked things for me. i think it's the quality and the size.
quality: despite being a hardcover it has a lay-flat binding. the pages are a warm white. somehow that's a difficult thing to come by in sketchbooks, a white page. they're very often some variation of cream and i hate how that distorts the colors i want to use. the paper's thick enough that it doesn't deform the next three pages if i have to press down a bit harder to lay down color. and it doesn't warp when playing with ink. in short - the paper doesn't argue or conflict with what i'm trying to do, it becomes an invisible collaborator enabling what i want to achieve. i never realized how much of my art making up until now was impeded by disagreeable paper.
size: it's an a6 which i used to think was way too small for a sketchbook but it allows for quick work. there's a rapid sense of progress, each page is self-contained. there's no feeling i haven't used the space up enough, that i should add something and then trying to make those things make sense together. the quick progress is encouraging, makes me want to keep going. and because even a full page is quite small it doesn't feel like i'm done, i wanted to do more art in that session. i've already filled 67 pages out of the 96 available.
effect: a completely different way of creating. i'm not "trying" to draw, thinking about what i could possibly draw, looking for references and inspiration. i've turned towards non-representational drawings and they're just pouring out of me. shapes and colors. experimenting, responding. each line in conversation with the previous one, each drawing inspiring a new one - what can i play with here? iterating, even a slight change is easily visible on such a small page. and when i tried interpreting one of the shapes in a representational drawing i immediately felt the full body-mind pull back in a cringe, that's just not it for me. (i mean i could have known this from my abstract collages but somehow i considered the different mediums to have no thematic connection.)
i have a few instances of creating this freely in my adult life but up until now the joy was mostly in the process. now it's somehow both the process and the outcome. wish i could bottle this and send it to all my friends.
