Art book ideas. Sketchbook ideas: design. Old books and written notebooks
Any creative person has ever had a moment when he wants to draw, but has no ideas. When maintaining an art book, you need constantly gain inspiration from different sources, look for sources, and also fantasize and come up with new images, which are sometimes so difficult to bring to life. Artbook is a “book of creativity.” Each artist decides for himself how to design his creative diary.
Basically, in such a book you make sketches and draw your own characters. This is not an album with full-fledged drawings, which necessarily need color, shadows and highlights with the composition. This is a book in which the artist trains his skills and abilities, improves his drawing technique and simply uses all the possibilities of his imagination.
The first rule of a creative person running an art book is to draw any picture: everything you see. This could be a bowl of fruit sitting on the kitchen table; a man on the subway reading a book; a beautiful bird that diligently builds a nest outside the window. But when you don’t feel like sketching at all, the artist is faced with a problem: what to draw?
Artbook ideas
To have more ideas and want to draw more often, you can use the following tips for keeping a creative notebook:
Blank sheet.
Genius rules over chaos, and the artist is an undeniable genius. There is no need to start keeping a creative book from the first page. You can open it on any page and start creating. This way, you can choose the page that you like at any time, without worrying about the order of the sketches.
Living landscape.
So that the landscape does not seem boring, do not be afraid to add details: animals, people, insects, etc. It is possible and even necessary if necessary enlarge or reduce certain objects so that they play differently. An artist can bring a drawing to life if he adds what comes from his imagination.
Notes.
Don't be afraid to add captions and notes to your drawing. They allow you to understand what the artist expects from the drawing, what message he wants to convey. Notes help a novice artist to develop, to be bolder and to carry through not only the drawing itself, but also what it carries within itself. A note is a kind of signature to the picture that helps it come to life.
Peculiarity.
Anything can be a feature. For example, you can take one object from the place you are drawing and then stick it on the same page of the art book. It could be a leaf from a tree, a flower from a meadow, even a toothpick from a cafe. Anything. This feature of the art book will not only turn it into a truly creative book, but will also help you easily transfer it to the place from which the sketch was taken.
30 days of creativity
There are different lists that help you draw every day, following certain rules: the artist must draw one sketch or drawing every day, without missing a single one. Here is one such list:
Turning on your imagination and using the tips presented above, you can make your art book speak with images and inspiration: language creative people.
You are flying in a hot air balloon under the arch of a rainbow somewhere over the emerald meadows of Norway. And you understand that when you wake up, all this will no longer be with you - no ball, no rainbow, no Norwegian meadows and valleys. How to save all this? Yes, you guessed it right.
“According to how you see things, what feelings are hidden behind your works, you change. Drawing helps not only to convey and copy objects. With its help, you can enhance what you see and give the object an emotional component. The drawing will only get better from this! Feel free to draw as you feel. The drawing should show how you feel about the object! Compromise in art means death. The brighter the emotions in the drawing, the more interesting it is.”
This idea from the book "The Sketchbook of Your Ideas" seems to have greatly influenced the way I draw. On my attitude towards drawing. Previously, I really wanted to copy everything very accurately when I copied from photographs or paintings I liked. But accuracy in drawing is not the most important thing; there is a camera for that. Copies are not interesting. But when the picture shows the attitude towards the object, the emotions are visible - it’s a completely different matter. And what a camera is definitely not good for is that it cannot capture an idea, or a dream, or a memory. And you can draw all this.
Below I will tell you more about this book, but for now this is what I have come up with over the past couple of weeks:
Feather
Remember the crazy colorful dawn from ? Then the diluted paints remained and they turned into a feather.
Forest
Red-billed Blue Birds (Fatted)
City
When I just started drawing, two days before summer, I was seriously interested in the question - where do illustrators get their images from? I now know the answer to this question. Firstly, the image is invented for the task. The book “The Illustrator Profession” perfectly shows how to do this using the Morphological Matrix tool. Secondly, the image throws up your own unconscious when you don’t expect it at all. For me this happens most often when I fall asleep. One night, this picture of the city was born against the backdrop of bright clouds:
And another time this image came:
Why lion? Why with feathers on his head? At three o'clock in the morning I couldn't fall asleep, but I was drawing...
To ensure that the images that emerge from the darkness and silence are not lost, I always have a rough sketch pad with a pen next to my bed.
Branch with flowers with watercolor pen
A watercolor pen is a beautiful miracle. She can do some really cool things. You can mix colors, vary color saturation, and write out very subtle elements. Lovely. When I drew this picture, I thought that I would have to try making her own postcards. She's perfect for this. Sometimes priceless things cost nothing at all.
Summer in Perm
Something is all bright and colorful, let me draw reality, I once thought. I spent a long time selecting colors, mixing paints: white, ultramarine, bright blue, sepia and neutral black. And I painted the sky. Real summer sky of Perm 2015. Similar?
Tree outside the window
Sketchnoting, evolution in 50 days. On the left is what happened when I first started drawing. The first book about Visual Notes, remember? It turned out to be, frankly, scribbles :) On the right is the second attempt after about 50 days. Neatness, shadows, composition - I like it much more.
Speed reading trainer, professional coach, book sommelier, blogger. Believes that human abilities are flexible and can be developed, including reading speed, thinking, creativity, memory, intuition, awareness. He believes that books describing people’s experiences, ideas, and stories are an invaluable way to understand the world and an endless opportunity for independent education. Over 14 years of studying Russian and foreign schools and books on brain development and speed reading, I created my own system for working with information. Conducts corporate and individual trainings. He is interested in photography and badminton.
You are flying in a hot air balloon under the arch of a rainbow somewhere over the emerald meadows of Norway. And you understand that when you wake up, all this will no longer be with you - no ball, no rainbow, no Norwegian meadows and valleys. How to save all this? Yes, you guessed it right.
“According to how you see things, what feelings are hidden behind your works, you change. Drawing helps not only to convey and copy objects. With its help, you can enhance what you see and give the object an emotional component. The drawing will only get better from this! Feel free to draw as you feel. The drawing should show how you feel about the object! Compromise in art means death. The brighter the emotions in the drawing, the more interesting it is.”
VKontakte group with drawing lessons
I started keeping an art journal many years ago. Then it was just a checkered notebook, every centimeter of which was covered with drawings and collages made from pieces of paper, rags and tickets. As the years passed, what was customary to keep under the pillow became fashionable and public. Many manuals and seminars have appeared on the rules of creating and maintaining creative diaries. A small hobby has turned into a popular trend.
Trying to figure out why something that was almost intimate and highly specialized has become almost ubiquitous, I came to the conclusion that, in fact, keeping an art book is one of the most enjoyable and interesting ways to try out various artistic techniques, master the basics of design, and create something bright and attractive, without having seven years of art school behind her.
During the popularity of this hobby, various directions, styles and methods of creating art books. I invite you, together with me, to look into this colorful world and figure out who is who and what they eat with.
What is an artbook?
There is no specific meaning here. Everyone has their own art book, because under one cover you can collect sketches from life, drawings, sketches, illustrations - even a plan of your apartment and a list of products made different ways and materials. The base is a ream of paper, sewn with thread, glued or assembled on a spring, obtained from a store or created by hand. Filling - everything that excited your imagination and made you grab a pencil. The concept of art book also includes a sketchbook, smashbook, junkbook, travelbook and others - depending on the material with which you decide to create.
Sketchbook
Sketches are instant sketches. Most often they are done with graphic materials (pencil, charcoal, liner, pen, pen). It happens with the addition of color with pencils, watercolors, felt-tip pens or water markers. In fact, the materials used are those that are easiest to take with you in a small purse and start drawing in a cafe or subway car. As a basis for a sketchbook, use a small notebook on a spring with thick cardboard or moleskine and its analogues.
Literally, a travel book is a book about travel. The fashion for travel books has existed for a very long time, and most often this hobby is classified as scrapbooking. Because it consists mainly of treasures obtained during travel: these are boarding passes, stamps, pieces of foreign magazines, maps, souvenir printing, your notes with impressions, tickets from museums and theaters. If you also know how to draw (which is not at all necessary), you can supplement the pages with sketches of sights, doodles and patterns. The basis or blank for a travel book, as a rule, is an A5 notebook on a large spring with a hard cover. As the notebook fills, postcards, photos, envelopes, origami, maybe even shells and pebbles will be pasted into the notebook; it will become thicker and thicker, and books sewn with thread will simply stop closing after a while. A thick cover is needed to make it convenient to fill out the notebook on the road, in the absence of a table, and, most importantly, so that our treasures are not damaged.
Smashbook
Many of us keep all sorts of creative junk in the corners, such as candy wrappers, pieces of wrapping paper, some rags with a beautiful design, stickers, magazines or newspapers we read a long time ago. And instead of collecting dust on them or reluctantly throwing them in the trash, you can create amazing collages from them. There are no rules, you just lay out your collection in front of you, select several elements that, in your opinion, are combined in color or subject (for example, a photo of a wolf from an animal magazine and a candy wrapper from the Little Red Riding Hood candy), and glue everything together on the page your notepad. You can use acrylic and watercolor paints, putty, glitter, nail polish, thread, literally anything. Creative notebooks are usually used as a basis. self made or create them yourself, but you can use absolutely any notebook or notebook purchased in a store. The main thing is to attach ribbons or strings to the edges of the cover so that the filled smashbook closes.
A notebook made of garbage - this is how this term is literally translated. I really love junkbooks and respect people who are capable of doing this type of creativity. The base for the junkbook is assembled by hand from used materials. It could be cardboard or pieces of paper. They don't need to be beautiful or valuable. In the future, you will still completely cover them with your creativity. This is a great way to give a second chance to used paper, old bills, copies, diaries filled with notes, in other words, paper that is only suitable for the trash. After you have prepared the paper, you can sew it with threads or put it on rings. You can learn more about how to assemble a junkbook in Natalie Ratkowski’s book “Allow Yourself to Create” or by watching one of the many video master classes on Youtube. They fill a junkbook, just like a smashbook: with little things dear to the heart, drawings, photographs.
The purpose of my article is to inspire you to go on an exciting journey through the pages of your own hand-made miracle book. You can create it yourself, or you can take an old algebra textbook and change it beyond recognition. However, for your art book to evoke admiring exclamations from the first page, inspiration alone may not be enough among your friends and, first of all, you.
I will tell you about how to fill your suitcase of knowledge in my next article “Artbook: a springboard into the world of creativity. It is important to know! “, and I continue to tell you every month in my course “Watercolor Art Book”.
- Visit the website www.artbook-mania.com
- Buy the book “Artbook. Your life in words and pictures."
- Buy Natalie Ratkowski’s book “Allow Yourself to Create.”
Artbooking is still little known in our country, and yet almost everyone has encountered it in one way or another and even practiced it.
Remember school questionnaires and “friends’ diaries” - ordinary common notebooks in which you pasted beautiful stickers, magazine clippings, postcards, and drew what you loved? What about dried flowers placed between the pages of your favorite book? What about notebooks in which you like to draw and just scribble between important notes? But all this is artbooking.
The word artbooking can be translated from English as “book decoration”. And the big advantage of this direction is that it does not require any material costs, unlike its related scrapbooking.
This is the creation of thematic notebooks: personal diaries, travel albums, notebooks for sketches and notes. The main rule of such notebooks is the complete absence of rules. Take an old, already filled-in diary, cover its pages with multi-colored paper, and draw something on top, write it and stick stickers. Or you can paint each sheet with paints - the main thing is that you like both the process and the result, and don’t even think about how the colors were chosen and whether the collage was compiled correctly. Just create, fully unleashing your imagination! And then you will understand what a wonderful psychotherapy this is, and how many positive emotions artbooking gives!
I won’t impose any master classes, but I will give you a few ideas. After all, the most important thing is to start, right?
As an art book, I use an ordinary general notebook with white unlined sheets. On this spread, I covered the left sheet with mother-of-pearl cardboard and cutouts from ordinary wrapping paper (their color doesn’t match the background at all, but we don’t have any rules!), and the right one - with a whole sheet of wrapping paper and pieces of paper decorated using curly scissors .
In general, I want to say that ordinary gift wrapping paper is the first assistant in our business. It is beautiful and costs many times less than designer paper for scrapbooking.
I also draw a round fish with different facial expressions on each page. She has already become a symbol of my art book.
Here the design uses clippings from New Year cards, and the background of the right sheet is painted with pearlescent watercolor (you can use any other pearlescent paint - it has a very beautiful sparkling shine).
It is very good to use various glitters to decorate your pages.
This can be glue with sparkles, and dry sparkles for the eyes (they are good to stick to colorless nail polish), and gel glitters.
You can also use textured cardboard as a background, and make notes on shaped sticky notes. Glued sequins and rhinestones also look good.
Eventually, your notebook will become very plump and may even stop closing. But this has its own charm, doesn’t it?
I think that such a direction as artbooking will appeal to many people. But the question immediately arises: where to start? Or run to the nearest stall for stickers, or to the store for scrapbooking supplies, or to the stationery store for paints and colored paper?
Of course, you will also need all this, but, first of all, you need to choose a notebook from which your art book will subsequently turn out. And here we encounter the first difficulty.
Now that you can find almost any stationery on sale to suit any, most demanding taste - from children's notebooks to exquisite moleskins, it is very difficult to choose just one thing. The variety of covers, designs and shapes makes your eyes wide open. But there is only one piece of advice: the most important thing is that you really like the notebook you choose. Without this, no art book will work. After all, an art book is not a gift album, it is your personal little treasure, one might even say, a refuge for the soul. Therefore, it is difficult to advise anything here, but I will still try to make a short review of notebooks.
1. An ordinary school notebook.
It can be squared or lined, and the number of pages varies greatly. School notebooks are good because they have very beautiful covers and are relatively inexpensive. However, they have thin paper and if you plan to draw and glue a lot in the art book, the paper will simply warp.
2. Diaries.
They are, of course, more expensive, but there is more room for creativity. First of all, it has a lot of pages. Secondly, diaries can often contain drawings. And there are even diaries with multi-colored pages and locked with a key! In addition, diaries, as a rule, have a hard cover, which will extend the life of your journal.
But, alas, the paper there is even less suitable for design work.
3. Notebooks for notes and notes
This also includes the famous Moleskin. These are a kind of ready-made art books. There are interesting pictures printed on each page, and all you have to do is make notes and, if desired, add to the pictures.
These notebooks are good for everyone, except that they are quite expensive and leave little room for creativity.
4. Sketchbooks.
This is probably best option. Here the paper is adapted to any creative experiments, and there are no extraneous lines or inscriptions.
5. Old books and written notebooks
This is a very interesting technique. For an art book, it is absolutely not necessary to take a new notebook or album. You can use a written diary or an unnecessary book. You will either cover each sheet with colored paper or paint over it. This will give your art book the look of an old book and even some mystery.
Notebooks are either sewn or spring-loaded. Which one to choose? Again, this is a double-edged sword. In merged notebooks, you can use a spread right away, but notebooks on a spring, when they swell, close better.
In a word, choose what you like. And most importantly, love your notebook!
