What Do You Do With a Sketchbook When You Are Done With It?

In Part 1 we talked about what to put in a sketchbook. In Part 2 we talked about how to pick the right one. Part 3 is about what happens after, and the answer is not always what you would expect.

Sometimes a sketchbook page becomes a painting. Sometimes it becomes nothing at all. Both are valid and I mean that without any qualifier attached.

When it does become something

It rarely arrives in a straight line. Sometimes it is the way light hit an object that I captured quickly and came back to months later. Sometimes it is a color palette. I have swatches from Seville that made it into work long after the trip.

Sometimes it is a full composition. The oranges in this painting came directly from a sketchbook page.

Sometimes it is a note I jotted in the back of a book, my own wondering about why a Monet pulled me across a room before I knew it was a Monet, that became a piece of writing that fed a painting. Sometimes it is something stranger, like the way everything looked when I did not have my glasses and I started seeing shapes not as they are but as color and light and suggestion. That became a way of looking I now use deliberately.

A sketchbook is not a finished work waiting to happen. It is a record of what you were paying attention to. Some of it will surface later. Some of it will surprise you.

When it does not become anything

This is where I want to push back on something.

We live in a culture that measures the value of doing something by what it produces. If it does not result in a finished piece, a sale, a post, a product, then what was the point.

The point was the doing.

The doodle books, the pages that go nowhere, the sketchbooks full of practice and failure and mindless marks, those serve a purpose too. They are where you think. Where you stop thinking. Where you practice. Where you learn. Where you have a safe space to fail without it costing you anything. They are the building blocks of skill, the steps toward confidence, the place where you find yourself when you are still finding your artistic voice.

Hang onto them. All of them.

On a bad day, open an old one. Look at where you were. You will see how far you have come and that perspective is worth more than any finished painting on a wall. It will remind you that if you came this far you can probably go further. It will remind you to play. To have fun. To remember why you started.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

Jackie

This is Part 3 of a three part series on sketchbooks. Start with Part 1: What Do You Actually Put In a Sketchbook, and Part 2: Which Sketchbook Do You Actually Need.