LOOK MAN THE THING IS is that Chuck Jones once said that everyone has 10,000 bad drawings in them and the sooner you get those bad drawings out of the way the sooner you get to the good drawings and like! the bad drawings have to go somewhere! they have to emerge in all their messy ugly glory! you can't curate that shit! curating that shit is the fastest way to get, like, artistically constipated! don't do that!
sketchbooks are not for being pretty! sketchbooks are, like. the junk drawer of the artistic mind.
like. you see something and make a bad drawing of it. you think, "jesus christ this drawing fucking sucks. why do I even call myself an artist." you think, "I will never draw anything good again, I should give up this whole venture." you look at it again and say, "...huh, I actually like the energy of this bad drawing. it still sucks, but it's pretty dynamic."
the next day your brain goes "what about THIS" and you blorp out some fucking awful sketch of a character and it sucks but it has some of the energy of your previous bad drawing except somehow it's better.
a month later you shit out some execrable 30-second sketch of a dog you saw at the park and it also sucks but it has some line variation that, frankly, fucks super hard, and reminds you of why you like to draw.
the next day you scribble off something on a post-it note that takes your goddamn breath away. you stick the post-it note in your sketchbook.
three weeks later you have a burst of inspiration and churn out a dozen drawings, some from real life, some from imagination. half of them suck donkey dick but three of them are passable, two of them are really pretty good, and one of them is fucking inspired. like, you want to cry looking it, it's so good. you can hardly believe you made that.
of course, the next day everything you draw is fucking awful.
years later you pick up your old sketchbook, one of literal dozens that you have lined up on your book shelf, and you flip through it and you say, "jesus christ I love everything in here. holy shit, is that... that's the first iteration of <XYZ character>! I forgot I did that! I can't believe that character started with this sketch, I love that! god, I'm so glad I kept this."
that is what a sketchbook is for.
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
