Little Red Hen StudioLots to do, one chick to do it

Recently I needed to find an old sketch, and it took me a while. Here’s 20+ years worth of sketchbooks. Which makes me sound either very old or very experienced, or both. And neither is really the case. In my opinion. Moderately aged and experienced will do.

20+ years of journals

I waver between drawing and writing but the majority of my blank books are unlined, and contain drawings. The earliest journals I’ve kept are written; I didn’t start keeping a sketchbook until I was at art school in the late 80s. Some of my dip pen nibs date back that far.

Her nibs

In my early years of editorial assistantship in the magazine industry in New York, I wrote and wrote, probably to keep myself sane. The odd sketch pops up. I think I liked to reassure myself that I could still draw.

I stopped writing and drawing altogether when my kids were babies. Recently I found a journal that went from written entries entirely to a list of daily entries recording my premature son’s feeding schedule. This actually shows exactly where my head was.

Now I have too many blank books on the go. There’s some moleskines, both blank and lined pages (and one with watercolour paper) and a couple of generic blank books. And of course the online writing…

But here’s a fair selection of what I use on the desk at home. The tech pens are mostly a nostalgic throwback. I love the idea of them (and used pens like this contantly in high school) but they’re buggers for clogging and leaking. Soluble graphite is something newer — the giant crayon-looking things are lovely new additions to the drawing arsenal.

Drawing gear

Tags: drawing, inks, journals, moleskine, nibs, pens, sketchbooks, writing

I wrote this and edited it several times before Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 11:43 am and it is filed under Drawing conclusions, Narrative threads. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.